A Case Study Of English Downtoners From The Perspective Of Extended Units Of Meaning

Based on Sinclair’s(1996)“Extended Units of Meaning” model,this study uses collostructional analysis to explore the difference between English downtoners(taking almost,nearly,and virtually as an example)in their adjective collocates from three aspects: register distribution,semantic preference,and semantic prosody.The results are visualized through correspondence analysis.The results reveal that:(1)in terms of register,almost often occurs in fiction;nearly appears frequently in news;virtually is generally found in magazine;(2)with regard to the distinctiveness of each construction,adjectives after almost are often used to describe emotions;nearly is generally used with adjectives describing the existing condition;the distinctiveness of virtually is shown in two aspects: One is that it is often followed by adjectives describing whether the condition is complete or not and the other is that it often co-occurs with adjectives describing difficulty;(3)as for the semantic prosody,when they co-occur with adjective collocates,almost and nearly are connected with neutral semantic prosodies while virtually is associated with an apparent negative semantic prosody.The results of this study are not only helpful to strengthen the semantic discrimination of English downtoners for language learners,but also conducive to the compilation of dictionaries,making the relevant information in the entry more complete.In addition,the research method adopted in this study can also be applied to the discrimination and analysis of other near-synonyms,providing a more reasonable analytical approach to language studies in the future.