| Semantic prosody is an important research area in contemporary corpus linguistics.The availability of enormous authentic language use,with the analysis from three dimensions of collocation,semantic preference and semantic prosody,provides a brand-new perspective for the study of synonyms.This thesis adopts both qualitative and quantitative methods,with the data all collected from the Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA).This study selects five English synonymous verbs,namely STRENGTHEN,ENHANCE,REINFORCE,TIGHTEN and CONSOLIDATE,by extracting and observing their register distribution,high frequency co-occurrence collocates and randomly selected 110 concordance lines in the corpus to analyze the semantic prosody of "strengthen" and its synonyms.It is found that STRENGTHEN is generally collocated with human’s body parts,social relations or nouns that expressing human’s emotions and spirits,and it is usually the behaviors and results that people generally desire to obtain,which show more neutral and positive semantic prosodic characteristics;ENHANCE is generally collocated with nouns that represent the favorable things and human being’s behaviors and ideas at psychological level such as opportunity;development,value and freedom etc.,which presents significantly positive semantic prosody;the collocation nouns of REINFORCE contain the abstract nouns of people’s spirit and mind,social relations or other good things,which show the positive and neutral semantic prosodic tendency;TIGHTEN is mostly collocated with physical nouns representing human’s body parts or some objective existences,showing obvious neutral semantic prosody;CONSOLIDATE is not only collocated with abstract nouns that express human spiritual quality and state of mind,but also with the influential and powerful social nouns,representing strongly positive semantic prosody and neutral semantic prosody to a certain extent.On the similarities and differences of semantic prosody of five English STRENGTHEN verbs,this study can draw the conclusion that they all illustrate "mixed" semantic prosodies,that is to say that they all contain positive,neutral and negative prosodies with no single semantic prosodic feature in every node word;at the same time,the ratio of positive and neutral semantic prosody is much higher than that of negative semantic prosody.What differentiates them is the different proportions of semantic prosodies.On account of the different proportions of their semantic prosodies,ENHANCE and CONSOLIDATE show a more positive-oriented semantic prosodic tendency;REINFORCE and STRENGTHEN illustrate that their positive and neutral semantic prosodies are rather evenly distributed;and TIGHTEN,demonstrates more intuitive high ratio of neutral semantic prosody.This study aims to provide some new methods or perspectives or further vocabulary study,and also shed light on semantic prosody research in foreign language teaching or language studies. |
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