Lin Liu

English boasts a vast array of synonyms, which often pose significant challenges for learners, particularly in distinguishing between them. Semantic prosody is of great value in helping language learners differentiate synonyms, and corpora can provide robust data support for the use and differentiation of synonymic semantic prosodies. Therefore, this study employs a corpus-based Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis, combining qualitative and quantitative methods, to investigate the mastery of semantic prosodies among English synonyms—specifically, the nouns "finding," "result," and "outcome"—by Chinese university students majoring in English. It utilizes data from the Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners (WECCL) as the learner corpus and the British National Corpus (BNC) as the native speaker reference corpus. The results indicate that Chinese English majors tend to overuse the word "result" compared to native English speakers in terms of frequency. In terms of semantic prosody, while Chinese English majors generally grasp the semantic prosody usage of "finding," they have not yet mastered the use of "result," tending to overuse its positive semantic prosody. Additionally, for the word "outcome", Chinese English majors overuse its negative semantic prosody while neglecting its neutral semantic prosody. The findings of this study aim to provide insights or references for deep English vocabulary learning and corpus-assisted foreign language teaching.

corpus; semantic prosody; English majors; synonyms

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