Abstract
This paper reports a corpus-based study on English and Chinese semantic prime happen and fasheng in Natural Semantic Metalanguage. With the aids of computer software Wordsmith 5.0 and SPSS19.0, we conducted a contrastive study on happen and fasheng based on a small English and Chinese comparable corpus constructed by ourselves. By extracting evidence from the corpus, the distribution of happen and fasheng, their syntactic patterns, their colligation types as well as their semantic prosody are identified and analyzed. We found that there is no significant difference between English semantic prime happen and its Chinese counterpart fasheng with respect to their distribution, their syntactic patterns, their colligations, and their semantic prosody. The results reveal that semantic prime happen is identical with its Chinese counterpart fasheng. Thus it provides an evidence to justify the premise of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage Theory.
Highlights
As language is an important tool for human communication as well as a carrier of culture, its appropriate use in cross-cultural communication has always been considered important
According to the Chi-square tests, there is no significant difference between happen and fasheng with respect to the neutral semantic prosody: both constitute a relatively low proportion
This paper has sought to examine the Natural Semantic Metalanguage Theory by conducting a contrastive study on English and Chinese semantic prime happen and fasheng. As it was developed and tested by using corpus data, the work presented here has been able to overcome the inaccuracies and biases inherent in the previous intuition-based research, provide a more accurate and comprehensive understanding of semantic primes in both English and Chinese. From both quantitative and qualitative analysis, this thesis holds the view that semantic prime happen is identical with its Chinese counterpart fasheng. 4.1
Summary
As language is an important tool for human communication as well as a carrier of culture, its appropriate use in cross-cultural communication has always been considered important. The theory began as a method of lexical semantic analysis based on reductive paraphrase; that is, on the idea that the meaning of any semantically complex word can be explicated by means of an exact paraphrase composed of simpler, more intelligible words than the original (Wierzbicka, 1972), it voids the circularity and terminological obscurity in most dictionaries It follows that every language has an irreducible “semantic core” which would be used in dealing with all the complex expressions. Intensifier : VERY hěn, MORE duō Similarity: LIKE xiàng “The semantic metalanguage has not been fully described until its syntax (i.e. combinatorial properties) has been fully specified Nor, until this has been done, can we know whether the goal of a universal semantic metalanguage is realizable at all.” (Goddard, 2002: 32) The existence of some shared or matching combinatorial patterns across all languages is just as important to the project as the existence of shared semantic primes. The marriage of the corpus-based approach and traditional NSM analysis has enabled this thesis to produce a more realistic account in a way that has not been attempted previously
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