Corpus-Based Research On Chinese Engiish Learners’Usage Of English Synonyms

This comparative study aims at examining the Chinese EFL(English as Foreign Language) Learners’learning or acuquisition of English synonyms.The study extracts from a native speaker corpus and a learner corpus some database,which indicate the semantic and associated syntactic behaviors of the chosen group of synoyms:effect,consequence and outcome. All the three words can be translated into Chinese"JIEGUO"and "HOUGUO".The distributional differences of this group are difficult to be recognized and analyzed soley by human intuition, even by authoritative English dictionaries.However, the differences are so important to be made clear in order to provide Chinese EFL learners with clear evidences that they can get accessible to native likeness.Since human intuition fails to clearly tell differences among synonyms, the study adopts a new approach-the corpus-based approach, to demonstrate the semantic and syntactic behaviors of the chosen group of synonyms.The corpus-based survey adopts a combination of quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis. The data are derived respectively from Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC) and British National Corpus (BNC). Firstly,the three nouns one by one are derived and all the concordance lines are extracted. Secondly, with the aid of relevant calculator-Antconc, MI value and Z-score will be calculated for further studying. Lastly, the semantic prosodic features of the three items are generalized through analyzing the semantic feature of their significant collocates. The author will summarize their distinctions and similarities.The results indicate that there do exist differences and similarities regarding the three items among their English usages by native speakers and Chinese learners in terms of collocation, semantic prosody and colligation. There are some cases when English of Chinese learners display similar semantic prosody as compared with those of native speakers. While in most times, Chinese learners tend to be showing totally contrary semantic prosody employed by native speakers. Besides, from the perspective of typical collocation, great differences lie between native speakers’English and Chinese English learners. Chinese learners use a great amount of inter-language collocations and even invent really non-existent collocations, which awfully ruin the due semantic prosodic harmony, making their English sound quite unnatural and less idiomatic.Based on these findings, the thesis provides Chinese EFL teaching and learning with some practical implications, especially sheds light on vocabulary instruction as well as English dictionary compilation. Firstly, it is proposed that the knowledge of semantic prosody should be introduced to students so that they would be aware of semantic prosody in their English usage. Secondly, it implies that the knowledge of semantic prosody can aslo provide insight into the teaching of near synonyms.Near synonyms containing identical or similar denotation meaning can be distinguished by means of their typical collocation behaviors and unique semantic prosody. Thirdly, the deficiency in collocations in learner English reveals that more attention should be paid on the teaching of collocation than teaching lexis without contexts. Lastly, the author addresses that most contemporary English learner dictionaries fail to estimate the value of semantic prosody. It is suggested that adequate information with regard to semantic prosody should be incorporated with English dictionaries.