A Corpus-Based Semantic Prosody Study On Chinese EFL Learners’Degree Adverbs Collocation

In daily communication, degree adverbs play a significant role in language and are often used to reinforce the tone which could clearly express the speakers’attitudes and realize the interpersonal metafunction of language. Semantic prosody, which is usually divided into positive, negative and neutral/mixed categories, is an vital language phenomenon studied by corpus linguists.With the aid of software AntConc3.2.0w and SPSS11.5and based on the corpora of Brown and CLEC, degree adverbs, quite and rather, are singled out as a case study. By comparing, contrasting and observing the frequency, the colligation, the frequencies of the collocates of two node words and their semantic prosody through Brown and CLEC, the study analyzes specifically the features of the collocates of the node words, at the same time compares the differences between Chinese EEL learners and native speakers, and then discusses the possible reasons for these features.The results indicate that there is a significant difference between quite and rather used by native speakers from the aspect of semantic prosody. For instance, they usually use quite in positive prosody and rather in negative prosody. And there is also a significant difference in the use of quite or rather respectively by native speakers and Chinese EFL learners. The differences especially lie in the colligation of adjectives and adverbs which is the focus of this thesis because it is of the majority of proportion both in Brown and CLEC.The major implications can be concluded that teachers should make students aware of semantic prosody, and give guidance to students in the method to distinguish the degree adverbs by observing their semantic prosody. Therefore, students may correctly use the semantic prosody of lexical item.