A Study On The Extended Units Of Meaning Of The Evaluative Adjective Important In Written English By Chinese EFL Learners

The present study takes Chinese Learner English Corpus(CLEC)as the observed corpus and British National Corpus(BNC)as the reference corpus,analyzes the use of the evaluative adjective important in written English by Chinese EFL learners as compared with native English speakers from the aspects of word frequency and extended units of meaning,namely collocation,colligation,semantic preference and semantic prosody.The results show that:1.At the level of word frequency,there is a significant difference in the use of the evaluative adjective important between Chinese EFL learners and native English speakers with the former overusing i,riportant and the latter underusing other adjectives with the same meaning.With the improvement of Chinese EFL learners' English level,the use of important is reduced and the use of other adjectives with the same meaning is increased.2.In terms of collocation,compared with native English speakers,Chinese EFL learners underuse adverb collocates and overuse common collocates.And when expressing the same meaning,the collocates used by Chinese EFL learners are less abundant in form than those by native English speakers and lack of diversity.The main reason is the deficient vocabulary knowledge input3.In terms of colligation,Chinese EFL learners basically grasp the colligational types of important used by native English speakers.However,affected by negative language transfer,certain Chinese EFL learners tend to mistake the colligation "it V-link ADJ for sb.to-inf" for "it v-link ADJ to sb.to-inf".4.In terms of semantic preference,Chinese EFL learners prefer to collocate important with nouns about economy and politics and adjectives about the nature of people or things,while native English speakers prefer to collocate important with riouns about some disciplines and adverbs about the nature and manner of conducting an action.5.In terms of semantic prosody,Chinese EFL learners tend to form neutral semantic prosody with collocates when using important,which is consistent with native English speakers.Differently,Chinese EFL learners are more likely to underuse important to form negative semantic prosody with collocates.This study can be used for reference in language teaching and learning,especially in vocabulary teaching and learning,textbook compilation and lexicography.