A Comparative Study Of The Semantic Rhyme Of "acquired" English Verbs

Semantic prosody,as one of the most significant contributions of corpus linguistics,provides a new perspective to lexical behavior.When a lexical item collocates frequently with some other words,it will be imbued with related semantic features and form a special semantic environment,which is termed as semantic prosody.The direct significance of semantic prosody is to provide a new method for studying lexical behaviors in language,especially in differentiating and analysing synonyms or near-synonyms.The study adopts the corpus-based Interlanguage Contrastive Analysis(CIA)approach,choosing CLEC and COCA corpus to analyse the semantic prosody of English words which include the words “achieve”,“acquire”,“gain”and “obtain”.It is found that “achieve” has a positive semantic prosody in COCA and CLEC corpus.“Acquire” has a positive semantic prosody,whereas its indexes is less than 100,it cannot be concluded as semantic prosody in CLEC.Nevertheless,there are only three typical noun collocations of “acquire” in CLEC which is much less than those of native speakers.“Gain” has similar positive semantic prosody in CLEC and COCA.However,compared with native speakers,Chinese English learners express more positive meaning when using “obtain” and the use of collocates is totally beyond the range of collocation which leads to prosodic clash.Then the cause of prosodic clash is stated.This study aims to provide new methods and perspectives for lexical research,and to provide suggestions for the application of semantic prosody in English teaching?dictionary compilation and language study.