A corpus-based study on the semantic prosody of quasi-affix “Zu”

Abstract

Semantic prosody has been a hot issue in corpus linguistics since it has been put forward in the early 1990s. Some theories suggest that some words in specific context are subject to semantic inflection. However, this paper argues that semantic prosody appears in not only collocation, but also words and their internal affixes. In this paper, we chose the most commonly used quasi-affix “Zu” as the research object. Our study explores the semantic prosody tendencies of “X_zu” and analyzes the cognition mechanism of the words constructed as “X_zu”. The analysis shows that the words of “X_zu” implicating negative meanings appear more frequently than those with positive ones based on a large scale corpus.