A Corpus-based Study Of Adjectives In English Textbook For Senior High School

Based on corpus, the thesis investigates the presentation of adjectives in Englishtextbook for Senior High School published by People’s Education publisher(New SeniorEnglish for China, NSEC for short). Taking Collins COBUILD English Course (CCEC forshort) as the reference corpus, it aims to find out whether NSEC chooses the most frequentlyused adjectives and presents their practical usage by answering the following two questions:1. How well do adjectives in NSEC covers the adjectives frequently used by native speakers?2. How well do NSEC presents the core meanings and typical patterns of adjectives used bynative speakers?The study finds that the coverage degree between adjectives in NSEC and CCEC reaches76.4%, which shows that NSEC basically covers the frequently used adjectives. However,there are still some adjectives presented with a over high or low frequency. Besides, comparedwith CCEC, NSEC lacks some adjectives with rich meanings, careful description and vividexpression. For example, adjectives describing color, such as chocolate，khaki，sapphire，blonde and adjectives used to picture characters, personality and emotion, such as sly，mischievous，snappy，hectic，distressed，ecstatic，furious.The depth investigation shows NSEC basically presents the core meaning of theadjectives and their collocation. The collocation between adjectives and nouns reflect somefeatures of NSEC, such as the richness and diversity of topics and content, the close relationto students’ real life experience. However, NSEC needs to improve the presentation of adjectives in terms of colligation, semantic preference and semantic prosody. On the aspect ofcolligation, NSEC has not presented some typical colligation of certain adjectives or has notdisplayed the typical pragmatic meaning in certain colligation. Regard to semantic preference,NSEC has not presented some semantic preference of certain adjective or lacks the accuracyand diversity of words choices. In terms of semantic prosody, NSEC has an unappropriateportion among positive, negative and neutral semantic prosody or has a discordance betweenthe strong and weak degree of negative semantic prosody.The study is expected to have the following four implications:1) The study reveals the limitations of adjectives presentation in NSEC concerning thechoices of adjectives and usage of their core meaning and typical patterns.2) The study emphasizes the importance of deep knowledge of words in vocabulary teaching.3) The study offers a new perspective of textbook vocabulary evaluation.4) The study popularizes the corpus approach with its effective usage in syllabus design,material development and evaluation and classroom English teaching.