| Semantic prosody refers to the attitudinal evaluation arising from the node word and its collocates on the pragmatic side to bridge the meaning and use,and its construct is usually specialized in lexical items rather than word classes. The advent of corpus linguistics and various kinds of learners’corpora makes it possible the examination of native speakers (NSs) and non-native speakers’(NNSs) use of semantic prosody in their language production, which provides a description of their language production and offers chances to explore similarities and differences in language learning. The present research aims to explore what are the similarities and differences in the use of semantic prosody between native students and non-native students when using English logical resultative formulae, by observing and investigating collocational behavior of logical resultative formulae in attested corpora. Both the quantitative method and qualitative approach are applied to conduct the investigation. Data-driven approach and Contrastive Inter-language Analysis are used to analyze the results. The corpora used to collect the data are British Academic Written Corpus and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners2.0. The software used to identify the concordance lines is Antconc, which is of great importance in eliciting the concordance lines. A number of statistical tests are performed by BFSU Collocator, which is of great significance in calculating the MI-score, log-log value, and log-likelihood. The object words include because of, so that, lead to, result in, due to, now that, thanks to, as a result of, as a result, caused by, result from, and bring about, which belong to logical resultative formulae.By observing frequency of co-occurrence, collocates, MI3, log-log value and log-likelihood value of the node word, and by combining quantitative and qualitative approaches. Semantic prosody of each logical resultative formula in students’compositions has been identified.The major findings are as follows:(1) Semantic prosodies of some logical resultative formulae, for example, as a result of as a result, BRING about, and so that are different in the two attested corpora. Data demonstrate that the phrase as a result of is negative prosody, and the other phrases -as a result, BRING about, and so that is neutral prosody in NSs’corpus. While in NNSs’corpus, the phrase as a result of is neutral prosody; the phrase as a result, and BRING about is negative prosody, and the phrase so that is positive prosody. Since different semantic prosodies lead to different attitudinal evaluation, different attitudinal evaluation leads to different collocations.(2) Most of the logical resultative formulae such as because of, caused by, due to, LEAD to, now that, RESULT from, RESULT in, and thanks to in the two corpora show similar semantic prosody. Even though there is similarity in the use and in the presentation of these phrases, there are still differences in the distribution of the proportion of semantic prosody in each phrase. Because the strength of semantic prosody is different, their collocates are also different. The proportion of semantic prosody of some phrases in NNSs’ corpus is overwhelmingly larger or smaller than that of NSs (the phrases due to, and RESULT from are excluded since they share nearly the same proportion of the same semantic prosody).(3)As for the different semantic prosodies in different genres, this would be an additional finding since data show that both NNSs and NSs share the same semantic prosody in some phrases but that differ from that of the previous investigation. One possible explanation may lie in the data selected to be studied. |
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