Analysis on semantic prosody of ‘mianzi’ and ‘lian’: A Corpus-Based study

Abstract

This paper explores the collocational behaviour and semantic prosody of the words ‘miànzi’ and ‘liǎn’ occurring in expressions pertaining to ‘human relationships’ or ‘reputation’ in modern Chinese. A statistical analysis of a 1.2 million words of authentic texts from the CCL corpus reveals that these two words tend to have opposite semantic prosody especially when used in the samesentence. Through a further investigation on the semantic prototype of ‘miàn’ and ‘liǎn’ via the diachronic corpus, ‘liǎn’ is mainly used to refer to the face of women or animals from the Wei-Jin Southern and Northern dynasties until the Ming-Qing dynasties. It also often used as curse words in novels of the Ming and Qing periods and clearly reflects the inequity between genders in the old days. This negative connotation thus gives rise to a negative semantic prosody in ‘liǎn’. This suggests that the emergence of a different semantic prosody for ‘miànzi’ and ‘liǎn’ in modern Chinese is rather an evolution and a result of its former use throughout history.