| With the fast development of corpus linguistics,semantic prosody becomes a research focus in the field of SLA.It was first put forward by Sinclair in 1991,which refers to the consistent aura of meaning with which a form is imbued by its collocates.The semantic prosody can be generally classified into three kinds: positive semantic prosody,negative semantic prosody and neutral semantic prosody.After the theory of semantic prosody comes into China,it attracts the great attention of Chinese linguists and scholars,but the study of it is still at a preliminary stage in China.The subjects of these studies are almost verbs or nouns while there are very few researches that focus on adjectives.The comparative study of semantic prosody is even fewer.Hence,this paper chooses a pair of adjectives as the research subjects,which includes big,large and great based on CLEC and BNC and combines quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis to investigate the similarities and differences in semantic prosodic tendency as well as the semantic prosodic features of the three node words between Chinese English learners and native speakers along with the possible reasons for the differences in using semantic prosody of the three node words between the two groups.The present study mainly consists of three procedures.Firstly,the total number of the frequencies of the three node words can be identified in both of the two corpora under the guidance of AntConc3.2.2.Then Log-likelihood ratio calculator is employed to calculate the significance of the frequency of the three node words used in CLEC and BNC.Secondly,the concordance lines of the three node words are extracted from CLEC and BNC respectively in order to have a preliminary view of the collocates of these three node words.After that,the significant collocates with a span of 3(three collocates on both sides of the node word are chosen)and their MI scores are retrieved with the help of BFSU Colloator1.0.Thirdly,based on the data acquired from concordance tool and related softwares,a detailed analysis and discussion on semantic prosody of the three node words are exhibited by the author followed by the possible reasons for the differences between Chinese English learners and native speakers within the theoretical framework of language transfer in this paper.The findings of the study show that Chinese learners overuse big and great and underuse large in comparison with native speakers.To be specific,the semantic prosody of big is neutral-positive mixed used by Chinese learners while it possess anobvious neutral semantic prosody used by native speakers.As for the node word large,it exhibits a predominant neutral semantic prosody in both of the two corpora.Then the third node word great shows a positive-negative mixed used by native speakers while it expresses a positive-neutral mixed used by Chinese English learners.The possible reasons for these differences are exhibited by the author as follows: the insufficiency of learners’ lexical knowledge,the inadequate awareness of semantic prosody of English words,the interference of the mother tongue and the deficiency in dictionary compilation.Based on the findings,the study also provides significant implications for EFL teaching and learning.Teachers should enhance Chinese learners’ awareness of semantic prosody,a corpus-based teaching and learning should be introduced into classroom,and lexicographers should take the information of semantic prosody into consideration. |
