A Comparative Corpus-based Study of Semantic Prosody

Abstract

The present study uses the main corpus CLEC and the reference corpus BROWN to explore the semantic prosody of COMMIT in Chinese EFL. The result indicates that Chinese EFL learners exhibit similar semantic prosody as compared with those of native speakers. Nevertheless, they still use lots of interlanguge collocations and unusual collocations, which ruin the due semantic prosodic harmony, thus making their English quite unnatural and less idiomatic. Finally, implications on integrating semantic prosody into ESL/EFL vocabulary pedagogy are discussed.