Semantic Prosody In English: A Corpus-Based Comparative Study Between Native Speakers And English Learners

This comparative study aims at exploring the semantic prosodic features of the English writings of Chinese learners by investigating the collocational behaviours of several lexical items. The thesis focuses on four lexical items, commit, cause, career and effect. Commit and cause are examples of negative semantic prosody, career represents positive semantic prosody, and effect stands for mixed semantic prosody.This corpus-based survey adopts a combination of quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis of the semantic prosody data. The data are retrieved respectively from Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC) and Brown University Standard Corpus (Brown) First, the four items are in turn concordanced through Wordsmith 3.0 in CLEC and Brown and all the collocates of the items are extracted. Then with the aid of EXCEL program, the MI value and Z-score are calculated for each extracted collocates. Those with a MI score of 3 or higher and a Z-score of 2 or higher are considered to be significant collocates. After that, the semantic prosodic features of the four items are generalized through analyzing the semantic features of their significant collocates. Finally, the data from the two corpora are compared to find the differences and/or similarities between native speakers and Chinese English learners.The results indicate that there are differences as well as similarities between English writings by native speakers and Chinese learners in terms of collocation and semantic prosody. In some cases, English writings of Chinese learners exhibit similar semantic prosody as compared with those of native speakers. In other cases, Chinese learners are inclined to collocate a node word showing a positive prosody with collocates that show negative semantic characteristics, or vice versa. In addition, from the perspective of collocation, distinct differences exist between native speakers' English and learner English, even when the two show similar features of semantic prosody. Chinese learners use a good number of interlanguge collocations and unusual collocations, which ruin the due semantic prosodic harmony, making their English quite unnatural and less idiomatic.Based on these findings, the thesis can provide significant implications for EFL teaching and learning, especially for vocabulary instruction as well as dictionary compilation. Firstly, it is suggested that the knowledge of semantic prosody should be transferred to students so that they are able to gain due awareness of semantic prosody. Secondly, it implies that the knowledge of semantic prosody can also provide insight into the teaching of near synonyms. Near synonyms with identical or similar denotational meaning can be distinguished in their collocational behaviours and semantic prosodies. Thirdly, the deficiency in typical collocations in learner English reveals that more emphasis should be put on the teaching of collocation instead of teaching separate words without context. Lastly, given most contemporary English learner dictionaries neglect the explanation of semantic prosody, it is advisable to compile dictionaries that provide adequate information concerning semantic prosody features of vocabulary entries for English learners.