Abstract
Over the past two decades the concept of semantic prosody has attracted considerable research interest since Sinclair (1991) observed that “many uses of words and phrases show a tendency to occur in a certain semantic environment” (p. 112). Sinclair (2003) also noted that semantic prosody conveys its pragmatic meaning and attitudinal meaning. As the first scholar introducing the term ‘semantic prosody,’ Louw (1993) claimed that the habitual collocates of a lexical item are established through the semantic consistency of its subjects. Semantic prosody has thus been closely related to collocation learning in language acquisition research. In the context of collocation learning, near-synonyms particularly pose a difficulty for most foreign language learners due to their similar denotational meanings but un-interchangeable semantic prosody (Xiao & McEnery, 2006). The present corpus-based study was designed to compare the semantic preference and semantic prosody with three synonymous adjective pairs picked up from the academic core words in COCA (Gardner & Davies, 2013). The pairs were chosen based on the following criteria: a) their meanings were checked against Collins Thesaurus Online; b) the words with more than one meaning were removed; c) the word with more than one part of speech was defined the same as its paired word. All occurrences were examined manually at the span of 4 words to both the left and right. Discussion and implications were reported.
Highlights
Having created numerous examples rich in observations and insights, Stubbs (2001) re-assessed the concept of semantic prosody and re-named it as ‘discourse prosody’ as a response to Sinclair’s claims. Stubbs (2002) further acknowledged that “there are always semantic relations between node and collocates, and among the collocates themselves” (p. 225), and he grouped discourse prosody into three categories: positive, negative, and neutral.By examining the concordance lines, the present study looked at the semantic preference and semantic prosody of three synonymous adjective pairs in the academic texts of COCA and examined their semantic strength
One obstacle that may block the non-native learners on the road to academic success is the semantic preference and prosody with these synonymous word pairs while composing the academic texts
The present study aimed to examine the semantic preference and semantic prosody with three synonymous adjective pairs picked up from the core word lists of AVL across different academic disciplines, with an attempt to reinforce the professional development of foreign academic users by identifying the patterns of those synonymous pairs
Summary
Having created numerous examples rich in observations and insights, Stubbs (2001) re-assessed the concept of semantic prosody and re-named it as ‘discourse prosody’ as a response to Sinclair’s claims. Stubbs (2002) further acknowledged that “there are always semantic relations between node and collocates, and among the collocates themselves” (p. 225), and he grouped discourse prosody into three categories: positive, negative, and neutral. Having created numerous examples rich in observations and insights, Stubbs (2001) re-assessed the concept of semantic prosody and re-named it as ‘discourse prosody’ as a response to Sinclair’s claims. Stubbs (2002) further acknowledged that “there are always semantic relations between node and collocates, and among the collocates themselves” 225), and he grouped discourse prosody into three categories: positive, negative, and neutral. By examining the concordance lines, the present study looked at the semantic preference and semantic prosody of three synonymous adjective pairs in the academic texts of COCA and examined their semantic strength
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