Abstract
As great importance has been given to English in China, English public speaking is becoming an important part in students’ English learning. Meanwhile, many forms of English speaking contests have been flourishing in China over two decades. However, analysis of semantic prosodies in public speaking setting is relatively complex and subjective due to the difficulties in describing the evaluative meanings and the attitudes as intended by the speaker. This paper is a contrastive study of semantic prosody of the word feel which was concordanced from two sub corpora (CES_S and CES_C) from a self-built corpus (Corpus of English Speeches(CES)), aiming to explicitly reveal how EFL learners are different from native speaker when using a word with specific semantic prosody in English public speaking setting. The results show that there is no significant difference between Chinese students (EFL learners) and U.S and UK celebrities (Native English speakers) when they use the word feel with positive semantic preference in the context of delivering a speech, but EFL learners tend to express more positive emotions towards their counterparts than they do to themselves. In addition, the EFL learners have higher frequencies in using the word feel with the negative environment than the native English speaker do. This paper thus offers additional information on choosing the right semantic collocation and provide instructional guidance for English public speaking teaching and learning in China.
Highlights
In today's job market, demands for the academic disciplines, the versatility and competitiveness have prompted scholars, educators and researchers to emphasize the importance of learners' success in handling oral communication skills and public speaking skills (Tamimi, 2016)
The data set for this study was obtained from a self-built small scale corpus, Corpus of English Speeches (CES) with a sub-corpus of English speeches given by some Chinese college students who participated in various national speech contests (CES_S: 8018 types, 68000 tokens), and another sub-corpus of free speeches that were presented by some speakers in functions in the US and UK (CES_C: 21426 types, 148565 tokens)
By a quick search in the corpus, it is found that the word feeling is only used as a noun which, it is opined, is not a v+ing form, only feel, feels and felt were taken as the node words for the collocational concordance for semantic prosody
Summary
In today's job market, demands for the academic disciplines, the versatility and competitiveness have prompted scholars, educators and researchers to emphasize the importance of learners' success in handling oral communication skills and public speaking skills (Tamimi, 2016). As a form of learning to speak a foreign language, learners should focus on grammatical and semantic rules and acquire the knowledge of how native speakers use the language in the context of structured interpersonal exchange, in which many factors interact (Kang, 1997). It is necessary to examine the semantic and collocational features of public speaking genre from both EFL learners and native speakers by corpus-based method, hoping to explore some meaningful implications with objective data or evidence for EFL learners in English public speaking setting. The idea of semantic prosody was originally put forward by Sinclair in 1987, but the concept and term of semantic prosody was first introduced in 1993 by Bill Louw (Whitsitt, 2005) and it has since become an important part of corpus-based linguistic research claiming more attention from the linguists and researchers. The idea of semantic prosody was originally put forward by Sinclair in 1987, but the concept and term of semantic prosody was first introduced in 1993 by Bill Louw (Whitsitt, 2005) and it has since become an important part of corpus-based linguistic research claiming more attention from the linguists and researchers. Sinclair (1987) was the first to notice the phenomenon of semantic prosody in the collocational behavior of words and this built the foundations for the upsurge of several definition schemes for the concept. Greenbaum (1974) defines collocation as “a frequent co-occurrence of two lexical items in a language” and Hoey (1991) adds that the term collocation can only be used if a lexical item co-occurs with other items with a greater than random probability in its context
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