A Corpus-Based Study of Semantic Prosody of Career

Abstract

In recent years, a novel linguistic theme, semantic prosody, has attracted considerable attention in ESL/EFL (English as a second/foreign language) pedagogy. A number of lexical items in English are proved by previous research to demonstrate positive or negative semantic prosody or both. One lexical item, career is proven to carry obvious positive semantic prosody in ENL (English as a native language). On the basis of the corpora CLEC (Chinese Learner English Corpus) and BROWN (Brown University Standard Corpus of Present-Day American English), this paper attempts to investigate the semantic prosody of career in EFL. The result indicates that Chinese EFL learners are little aware of the positive semantic prosody of career and has used it inappropriately, which ruins the due semantic prosodic harmony, thus making their English quite odd and less idiomatic. Finally, implications on integrating semantic prosody into ESL/EFL pedagogy are discussed.