| Semantic prosody is a new theme in Corpus Linguistics as well as a fresh aspect of studying lexical behaviour. It is the phenomenon that the connotation of a lexical item can be conveyed by the habitual co-occurrence of its collocates, as revealed through the exploration of a computer-readable corpus. Studies carried out before were mainly focused on semantic prosodic behaviour of specific English words either in general or specialized texts. And the relation between semantic prosodies and dictionaries has been briefly touched upon by some scholars. This paper aims at observing the situation of semantic prosodic representation in contemporary English-Chinese bilingual dictionaries through describing semantic prosodies of several English lexical items and on the basis of which, drawing a comparison between the semantic prosodic information revealed by British National Corpus and what is found in bilingual dictionaries. Furthermore, the paper offers suggestions for the incorporation of semantic prosodies into English-Chinese dictionaries. The study was based on the exploration of the British National Corpus with 100 million words and ten English-Chinese general-purpose dictionaries. In conclusion, the findings indicate inadequacies, especially in the representation of negative semantic prosodies, in contemporary English-Chinese general-purpose dictionaries, and the paper suggests that it is possible to represent semantic prosodic information in bilingual dictionaries by means of equivalents, examples and usage notes.
|
PDF Full Text Request