Representation Of Semantic Prosody In Dictionaries Of Chinese As A Foreign Language

Semantic prosody is a notion emerging from the study of corpus linguistics. Itrefers to a kind of evaluative meaning of the node word produced by its frequentco-occurrence with lexical items with similar semantic coloring, characterisable aspositive or negative, and is often used to express the attitude of a speaker to apragmatic situation. Semantic prosody remains hidden from perception, soknowledge about this kind of semantic feature becomes very important for foreignlanguage learners. Previous studies mainly focus on description of the semanticprosodic profile of a word, cross-language comparison of semantic prosodies of nearsynonyms, and contrast of semantic prosodic features between the inter-language of aforeign language learner and the language of a native speaker. All of these researchesfurther demonstrate the key role of semantic prosody in vocabulary acquisition of aforeign language as well as the necessity of semantic prosody information in foreignlanguage learner’s dictionaries. Some scholars have mentioned the relationshipbetween semantic prosody and dictionary compilation, or checked the treatment ofsemantic prosodies of certain English words in learner’s dictionaries as well asgeneral ones. However, few, if any, investigations of the representation of semanticprosody in dictionaries of Chinese, especially those of Chinese as a foreign language(CFL for short) have been conducted.The thesis first chooses the Emergence Verbs (“发生”,“出现”,“产生”,“爆发”and “涌现”) as research object and investigates their semantic prosodies based on theChinese Corpus in Sketch Engine. It then discusses the formation of these semanticprosodic features from the perspective of the Usage-based Theory. Next, the thesisexamines the representation of these semantic prosodies in four dictionaries of CFL(the Learner’s Dictionary of Contemporary Chinese, the Usage Dictionary ofChinese Words, HSK—A Dictionary of Chinese Usage:8000Words and theCommercial Press Learner’s Dictionary of Contemporary Chinese). Problems are found and an exploration to possible causes of these problems is made. According tothese causes, suggestions are put forward, together with some operational guidelinesfor better treatment of different kinds of semantic prosodies in dictionaries of CFL.As a tentative study on the representation of semantic prosodies of Chinesewords in dictionaries of CFL, the thesis is expected to help improve the compilationquality of dictionaries of CFL and to further the theoretical researches on semanticprosodies of Chinese lexicon.