A Corpus-Based Study on Collocation and Semantic Prosody in China’s English Media: The Case of the Verbs of Publicity

Abstract

This paper explored extensively the collocability and semantic prosody of the verbs of publicity in China’s English media, and then contrasted them with those in American newspapers. The purpose of the study is to disclose the attitudinal meanings from their linguistic performance. To that end, the Corpus of China’s English Media (CCEM) was built with 29,151,028 tokens, and the newspaper branch of COCA was used as a comparable corpus. All the col-locational patterns of the verbs were extracted from the two corpora, and they were further analyzed in great detail. The major findings of the study can be summarized as below: (1) The verbs of publicity are generally used more frequently in CCEM. (2) Chinese journalists tend to use some unique collocational patterns to describe some political, cultural or social concepts that are specific to China. (3) Chinese journalists have a preference for collocational patterns with a positive or neutral semantic prosody over those with a negative semantic prosody. These findings suggest that the attitudinal meanings could be worked out from the differences in collocational behaviors and semantic prosody between the texts in CCEM and COCA.