A Corpus-based Comparative Study Of The Semantic Prosodies Of English And Chinese CAUSE-group Near-synonyms In Business Corpora

The phenomenon of semantic prosody has attracted increasing attention in recent linguistic studies.It was first noticed by Sinclair and later put forward by Louw formally,who defines semantic prosody as“consistent aura of meaning with which a form is imbued by its collocates”(Louw 1993:157).In this regard,this thesis intends to conduct a corpus-based comparative study of English and Chinese CAUSE-group near-synonyms.Guided with the theories put forwarded by Sinclair and Hoey,this thesis applies the combination of data-based approach and data-driven approach,with data collected from the PolyU Business Corpora,to present a contrastive analysis of the semantic prosodies of the CAUSE-group near-synonyms.Four English CAUSE-group verbs CAUSE,BRING about,RESULT in/from and LEAD to and four Chinese ones导致,引起,产生and带来are selected as node words for the present study.The thesis makes a detailed exploration of the concordances of each node word and then goes on to contrast the semantic prosodic features of these near-synonyms.The contrastive analysis discovers that:Firstly,close translation equivalents display similar semantic prosodies in both English and Chinese business writing such as CAUSE and导致,BRING about and引起.Secondly,the selected Chinese CAUSE-group near-synonyms have a greater variety of dominant collocates than the English ones in business texts.While the dominant collocates of CAUSE,BRING about and LEAD to are words indicating hardship or change,those of the four Chinese node words also include lexical items charactering influence,emotion,attention and so on.Thirdly,in business corpora,the Chinese node words mainly exhibit neutral or negative semantic prosody,but the English ones show positive,negative or neutral semantic prosody.Besides,this thesis also gives some suggestions of dealing with the difference of English and Chinese CAUSE-group near-synonyms in business writing.The discussion of the CAUSE-group synonyms in English and Chinese business writing proves that both languages exhibit features of semantic prosody and that near-synonyms are normally not collocationally interchangeable in the business texts of either language as they show different semantic prosodies.This research enriches comparative studies on semantic prosody form a cross-linguistic perspective,which can provide implications for English vocabulary teaching,translation training and Business English dictionary compilation.