ABSTRACT

In recent years, with the development of corpus linguistics, the significance of semantic prosody in language research has been widely recognized. This concept refers to a certain semantic trend of words’ collocation behaviors. Due to the high frequency of the similar semantic features, the nodal words will infect their semantic features accordingly, so that the whole context is full of some kind of semantic atmosphere. Based on COCA and COHA, this paper is going to investigate the semantic prosody of the five causative verb phrases, namely result in / contribute to / lead to / incur / bring about. First of all, based on COCA, the author is going to make a synchronic analysis of the overall distribution of the emotional color of the collocation of the above vocabulary from three dimensions of positive, neutral and negative. Then, based on COHA, this paper aims to analyze the diachronic evolution of word meaning from the above three dimensions. 

After a close analysis of the corpus data, the results are not as the same as we assumed before. We Chinese learners of English prefer to adopt a positive semantic prosody of contribute to, while the result shown in COCA turns out to be different. All of the five causative vocabularies exhibit neutral semantic prosodies. As Li(2013) proposes that this can largely attribute to the negative transfer of Chinese to English as a second language. As for the diachronic evolution, compared with the inconspicuous distribution trends of the collocates of incur and bring about, the frequencies of neutral and negative collocates of both result in and contribute to underwent increases over the past ten score years. The frequency of negative collocates pared with lead to also had an apparent upward trend. 

Key words: Corpus-based Study  Semantic Prosody  Causative Vocabularies

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

ABSTRACT

中文摘要

CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION-1

1.1 RESEARCH BACKGROUND-1

1.2 PURPOSE AND SIGNIFICANCE-1

1.3 GENERAL FRAMEWORK OF THE PAPER-2

CHAPTER TWO LITERATURE REVIEW-3

2.1 STUDIES ON SEMANTIC PROSODY-3

2.2 STUDIES ON SEMANTIC PROSODY OF CAUSATIVE VOCABULARIES-5

2.3 SUMMARY OF PREVIOUS STUDIES-6

CHAPTER THREE DATA COLLECTION-7

3.1 INTRODUCTION-7

3.2 A BRIEF INTRODUCTION OF CORPORA-7

3.2.1 COCA-7

3.2.2 COHA-8

3.3 THE PROCESS OF DATA COLLECTION-8

CHAPTER FOUR ANALYSIS OF THE SELECTED CAUSATIVE VOCABULARIES-12

4.1 THE SEMANTIC PROSODY FEATURES OF THE SELECTED CAUSATIVE VOCABULARIES IN COCA-12

4.1.1 The Analysis of Result in-12

4.1.2 The Analysis of Contribute to-14

4.1.3 The Analysis of Lead to-16

4.1.4 The Analysis of Incur-17

4.1.5 The Analysis of Bring About-19

4.2 THE DIACHRONIC EVOLUTION OF THE SELECTED CAUSATIVE VOCABULARIES SHOWN IN COHA-21

4.2.1 The Analysis of Result in-21

4.2.2 The Analysis of Contribute to-24

4.2.3 The Analysis of Lead to-25

4.2.4 The Analysis of Incur-26

4.2.5 The Analysis of Bring About-27

CHAPTER FIVE CONCLUSION-30

5.1 FINDINGS OF THE SELECTED CAUSATIVE VOCABULARIES-30

5.2 LIMITATIONS-30

BIBLIOGRAPHY-31