A Corpus-based Comparative Study Of Semantic Prosody In News English Between China And The West

Semantic prosody is considered one of the major advances in corpus linguistics.Research into semantic prosody has multiplied rapidly.Semantic prosody is subtle in that it is hidden between the lines,both included by writers and understood by readers subconsciously.It conveys the speaker’s or the author’s attitude and thinking towards an apparently objective environment,usually coloring the environment subconsciously in a positive,negative,neutral or mixed manner.In recent years,scholars are exploring semantic prosody in the field of language teaching and lexicography gradually,but research into news English,in particular,environmental news is sparse.Many English readers feel that there are differences between the news English published in China and western countries when they are reading news English,but cannot tell what makes for this difference.Therefore,on the basis of two self-built news corpora,environmental news in Reuters(ENRC)and environmental news in China Daily(ENCC),each authored by different groups of writers,the researcher conducts a comparative analysis of the semantic prosody in news English.In this context three node words are selected for analysis,China,air,and energy.The analysis is conducted using both the software Ant Conc 3.2.1 and manual filtering.Following the analysis,the collocational features,colligation patterns and semantic prosody features of them as well as similarities and differences and the reasons are summarized.The findings are that all three node words have similarities in terms of collocation,colligation and semantic prosody,but they also have some significant differences: First,all three node words tend to collocate with nouns in both corpora,while compared with ENRC,in ENCC,China is more likely to co-occur with proper nouns such as governments and environmental organizations and air + noun colligation tends to collocate with “control” or “improve” verbs which have a semantic preference for environment protection.“ADJ + energy” demonstrates positive semantic preference but no obvious semantic preference in “energy + N” in both corpora.Second,all three node words have similar typical colligation patterns in the two corpora,such as noun + noun sequence,which implies the concise and comprehensive features of news English.Third,although all three nodes have a mixed semantic prosody in both corpora,they manifest a strong tendency towards positive in ENCC,by contrast to ENRC,which shows a more negative semantic prosody.Three possible reasons are discussed that could explain the differences: first,the writers have different perspectives;second,the writers have different ideologies;third,the writers might have different habits in their use of language.The major findings of differences and the possible reasons for them have an important implication for news English writers and their readers to write and understand it.Meanwhile,the limitations of this present study and suggestions for further research to build upon it are addressed.