A Corpus-based Comparative Study On The Semantic Prosodies Of The Word CONSEQUENCE

The present thesis focuses on Chinese English learners'performances of colligation, collocation and semantic prosody of CONSEQUNECE to show Chinese English learners' characteristics of learning behavior. This thesis is a comparative study based on CLEC (Chinese Learner English Corpora) and British National Corpus (BNC). With the aids of the computer software WordSmith 5.0 and SPSS 16.0, it adopts Corpus-based Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (CIA) approach and examines the overall distributions and the frequencies of CONSEQUENCE with positive, negative, and neutral prosodies and identifies the differences and similarities between native speakers (NSs) and Chinese English learners.Through the quantitative analysis of its collocations, colligations and semantic prosody we found that the word CONSEQUENCE has a strong negative prosody. Among the 7863 concordance lines in BNC, there are 4677 (59.4811% of the total occurrences) of negative semantic prosody of CONSEQUENCE. Among the 77 concordance lines in CLEC, there are 44 (57.1429% of the total occurrences) of negative ones. Based on the Chi-square tests, there is no significant difference in the use of the negative semantic prosody in CLEC and BNC. Native speakers as well as Chinese EFL learners also use the same two colligations which can be summed up as "Adj.+CONSEQUENCE" and "Prep. (as/for/in...)+CONSEQUENCE+of +N".Thorough the above research results, we may reach a tentative conclusion that Chinese EFL learners have acquired a comparatively full understanding of the usage of CONSEQUENCE with respect to colligation, collocation and semantic prosody. The current research also explores the reasons for Chinese English learners'learning behavior. Lastly, this thesis discusses the implications of corpus-based study for classroom teaching in general.