Semantic Prosodies Of The English Synonyms Of The Improvement-class From The Perspective Of Extended Units Of Meaning

This thesis studies the semantic prosodies of the four English synonyms improve,promote,increase and raise as found in the COCA and CLEC corpora in line with the theory of Extended Units of Meaning(EUM).Adopting a corpus-based and corpus-driven research method,the thesis mainly addresses the following three questions:(1)Do the four synonyms share positive,negative or neutral semantic prosody in native English in a marked way?(2)Are the semantic prosodic features of the four synonyms as understood by the Chinese learners of English different from,or similar to,those as understood by the native speakers of English?(3)If there are differences,what possible factors cause the differences?The major findings concerning the three questions are as follows.Firstly,with the word improve,Chinese learners of English have roughly grasped its positive semantic prosodic features.However,they seem to ignore its negative semantic prosody.Besides,it seems that they overuse the neutral semantic prosody of improve.Secondly,with promote,it manifests both positive and neutral semantic prosodies in CLEC,and the percentages by which the positive and neutral semantic prosodies of the word are manifested in CLEC are close to each other.This means that the Chinese learners of English use both the positive and the neutral semantic prosodies of promote frequently.No negative collocate of promote is found in CLEC.However,this is not the case in COCA.Apart from clear manifestations of positive and neutral semantic prosodies in COCA,the word also exhibits negative semantic prosody in the corpus albeit the percentage is small.This indicates that there are still differences between Chinese learners of English and the native speakers of English in terms of the usage of the semantic prosodies of promote.Thirdly,with increase,its neutral semantic prosody is discernible in both the two corpora,and the distributions of its neutral semantic prosody of increase are nearlythe same in the two corpora.In addition,among the four synonyms under investigation,the word increase is the one best acquired by Chinese learners of English.Fourthly,it is found that no negative collocates are used with raise in CLEC,but that the word manifests clear positive and neutral semantic prosodies in CLEC.The percentage of the positive semantic prosody of the word is nearly the same as that of its neutral semantic prosody manifested.On the other hand,the word raise manifests clear positive semantic prosody in COCA.Negative and neutral semantic prosodies of the word are manifested in COCA as well.Moreover,these latter two semantic prosodies are close to being evenly distributed in COCA.As far as the use of the semantic prosodies of raise is concerned,the English native speakers use the negative and neutral semantic prosodies equally well.By contrast,Chinese learners of English seem to have shown the tendency of using more often than not both the positive and the neutral semantic prosodies of raise.So it appears that Chinese learners of English have not fully grasped the semantic prosodies of raise yet.On the whole,given the data presentation,it can also be said that Chinese learners of English generally use the non-canonical or unidiomatic collocates of the four synonyms.Last but not least,the thesis also explores the possible reasons for the differences marking the use of the semantic prosodies of the four synonyms by Chinese learners of English and the native speakers of English.For example,factors like the traditional English teaching methods and the influence of our mother tongue may have caused those differences.