A Semantic Prosody Analysis on Two Synonymous Pairs in English Native Speakers’ and Chinese Learners’ Writings

Zhou Bi

doi:10.5539/elt.v12n8p14

Abstract

The concept of semantic prosody has attracted great research interest in language teaching. Identifying learners&rsquo; perception of semantic prosody and collocation may be beneficial to vocabulary teaching. This study analyzes two pairs of synonyms in English writings of Chinese students and English native speakers based on the ICNALE corpus. The analysis finds that Chinese writers&rsquo; perception of semantic prosody is mostly consistent with that of native speakers. However, the use of collocation is quite different between them.

Highlights

This study explores the use frequency, collocation and semantic prosody of two pairs of synonyms by comparing words in Chinese learners’ writings (CHN) with English native speakers’ writings (ENS)
All the concordance lines are evaluated based on the criteria, ten percent of which are evaluated by another rater, who is familiar with the criteria
All the other words do not have significant difference. This result suggests that the Chinese learners’ writings in applying the words increase, rise and decrease are much similar to those of English native speakers in the frequency perspective; but they overused the word reduce in writings

Summary

Introduction

This study explores the use frequency, collocation and semantic prosody of two pairs of synonyms by comparing words in Chinese learners’ writings (CHN) with English native speakers’ writings (ENS). The purpose of the study is to investigate whether there is difference in the use of words, collocation and most importantly, semantic prosody in Chinese students and English native speakers. The study is motivated by the research done by Xiao and McEney (2006), which compares the collocation and semantic prosody of near synonyms of Chinese and English. The research finds out that the near synonyms are normally not interchangeable in inter-languages as well as intra-languages because of different semantic prosody. Sinclair (1991) proposed the idea that “many uses of words and phrases show a tendency to occur in a certain semantic environment”. Few are done to investigate the actual difference between native speaker and foreign language learners

Objectives

Methods

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Conclusion