A Corpus-Based Contrastive Study On Collocation,Colligation And Semantic Prosody Of Near-Synonyms In BNC And CLEC

Differentiating synonyms has always been a key but difficult point in the process of English learning,especially in the learning of vocabulary.Language learners are often found to have mastered the usage of words,but cannot use them in authentic situations.Therefore,making a contrastive study,with the help of technology of corpus analysis,on the collocation,colligation and semantic prosody can help differentiate synonyms and promote effective vocabulary teaching and learning.This thesis employs BNC and CLEC to study a set of synonyms: ask,order and command from the three aspects: collocation,colligation and semantic prosody.The author summarizes the similar and different usages and reveal the possible causes.At the end of the thesis,the author gives implications and suggestions to lexical teaching based on the results.By using the native functions in BNC and WordSmith software,statistics have been collected.The significant collocates are listed according to the Z value and MI value,and the colligation are summarized based on significant collocates.The author judges the semantic prosody by referring to the original concordances and contexts of the node words.Finally,a contrastive study is made.The results indicate the similar and different word usages between Chinese English learners and native speakers.The results of node word ask shows that the usages are close to native speakers from the aspects of collocation,colligation and semantic prosody.The results of order,by contrast,show a few differences.The number of collocation and colligation used by learners is smaller.Even though the results in two corpora present neutral semantic prosody,order has a strong negative semantic prosody when used by native speakers.As for the node word command,tremendous differences exist.The tiny number of collocation and colligation in CLEC implies that the learners only grasp individual meanings of the word like “grasp” and“order”,but barely use the meaning of “overlook” or “deserve”.Although the word presents neutral semantic prosody in two corpora,a further wide context range and a strong intonation have been shown when it is used by native speakers.Two possible causes have been put forward based on language transfer and traditional lexical teaching.Eventually,three suggestions on lexical teaching are given:adopting corpus-based teaching,paying attention to the whole view of words whileteaching,and encouraging students to get more authentic materials.