A Corpus-based Study On Semantic Prosody Of Causative Verbs

Corpus is frequently utilized as a new research tool in many domains,this study aims to use it as a teaching tool to determine the semantic prosody tendency of words and then apply it to the English vocabulary teaching.Semantic prosody originated from Sinclair’s research on the word phrase “set in”with the aim to explore the semantic atmosphere formed between this phrase and the surrounding words.This exploration opens up a new world of vocabulary teaching and semantic exploration of words.For various words,what is the semantic atmosphere formed between them and the surrounding words? Is it positive or negative? More positive or more negative? This aroused the interest of foreign scholars,and discovered and introduced to China by Chinese scholar Professor Wei Naixing in the 1990 s.Taking Professor Wei Naixing’s study methods of semantic prosody as a theoretical foundation,this research will explore the words collocation in English writing of Chinese learners.This study attempted to explore the problems in the use of the causative verbs MAKE,GET,LET and RESULT IN between Chinese English learners and native English speakers in TECCL and NESSIE corpus.The frequency,collocation behaviour and semantic prosody of the four causative verbs are examined by the extraction from the two corpora,and pertinent conclusions are drawn.This study will be based on English vocabulary teaching and try to introduce semantic prosody into it,so as to solve the problems of inappropriate examples in vocabulary teaching.This study will focus on the following questions:1)What are the similarities and differences in causative verbs frequency between Chinese English learners and native English speakers?2)What are the similarities and differences in causative verbs collocation behaviour between Chinese English learners and native English speakers?3)What are the similarities and differences in semantic prosody of causative verbs between Chinese English learners and native English speakers?It is found that there are significant differences in the frequency,collocation behaviour and semantic prosody between Chinese English learners and native English speakers.In the frequency,the usage of MAKE,GET,and LET is identical for Chinese English learners and native English speakers.Besides,there are significant differences in the use of RESULT IN between Chinese English learners and native English speakers;in the collocation behaviour,it is discovered through comparison that Chinese English learners have a restricted vocabulary of collocation nouns;in the semantic prosody,using MAKE,GET,and LET is essentially the same for Chinese English learners and native English speakers,but Chinese English learners using RESULT IN to carry positive semantic prosody,which is not found in native English speakers.These questions can explore the problem of word choice and grammar structure of Chinese English learners’ writing.While these results can not solve all the problems,it is useful for teachers to study the English learners’ defects in word selection,thus this paper can guide teachers to get plenty of examples in their vocabulary teaching.