A Contrastive Corpus-based Research On Semantic Prosody And Collocation Between Chinese English Learners And Native Speakers

Since the advent of corpus linguistic in China from the 1980 s,many linguists have used this new-born scientific method to research foreign language teaching,translation,and linguistics and have produced abundant fruits.However,the study of corpus interpretation was started much later.In 1998,Shlesinger first advocated the study of interpretation via corpora.In China it was not until 2007 that the first interpretation corpus was established.In the study of corpus interpretation,the researchers are focusing on the study of linguistic features of interpretation texts and the study of interpreting process.The research has creatively compared the learner corpus PACCEL with the native English corpus COCA surrounding learners’semantic prosody awareness and collocation ability via the quantitative and qualitative research method,with a view to researching interpretation more objectively.Moreover,this research also sums up the common interpretation problems made in PACCEL-S1,analyzes the causes and proposes pedagogical suggestions.This research mainly involves two corpora,including the PACCEL designed by Professor Wen Qiufang and the Corpus of Contemporary American English designed by the Brigham Young University,the USA.The research subject surrounds one sentence from PACCEL-S“我们举办这次展会的目的是加强在这一领域的国际交流与合作”.First on the study of semantic prosody,the researcher extracted 13 synonyms of the Chinese“加强”from PACCEL-S1 and searched in COCA these 13 words with the right span set to 3 words.After summing up the semantic tendencies of the right collocates of the 13 words according to the survey results in COCA,the researcher can establish the semantic prosodies of the 13node words.Then after comparing with PACCEL-S1,the results show that among the183 samples,only 35.5%have used the node words in the correct semantic prosody,60.5%haven’t used the node words in the proper semantic prosody and 4%have been excluded because of incomplete information.On the study of learners’collocational ability,the research mainly involved two V-N phrases“加强交流”and“加强合作”.After investigating in COCA and comparing with PACCEL-S1,the researcher foundthat among the 183 samples,the percentage of valid collocations has reached 83%.Then the researcher continues to sum up the common translation problems of the 183samples on the basis of the previous study and finds that the total number of translation problems has reached 171 times and the problems of incomplete translation and semantic errors are the top two problems made by learners.In the end,the researcher has proposed pedagogical suggestions to solve these problems.