Document Type : Original Article
Authors
Abstract
Semantic prosody is the most abstract and elusive concept among Sinclair’s classification of the extended lexical units. As a novel linguistic topic in corpus linguistic, semantic prosody is defined here as the collocational meaning arising from the interaction between a given node word and its collocates. For instance, the verb ‘main’ is associated with unpleasant things—problems, issues, and the like. In this paper, we tried to compare two groups of near synonyms (CAUSE vs. BRING ABOUT & RESULT IN vs LEAD TO) in a native corpus (BNC) in terms of their semantic prosody. Anthony (2017) software was applied to extract the prosodic and collocational patterns of near synonyms in the corpus. The results confirmed previous research, indicating that native speakers treat near synonyms differently in terms of their corresponding semantic prosodies. Hopefully, the findings will create a cross-linguistic awareness of semantic prosody, contributing mostly to vocabulary teaching and learning.
Keywords
)