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A Corpus-based Contrastive Study on the Acquisition of Synonyms of Chinese EFL Learners
LI Xiang, LIU Juan
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DOI:10.17265/2159-5836/2017.07.010
Guangdong Police College, Guangzhou, China
This paper investigates Chinese EFL learners’ acquisition of completely, totally and absolutely through a contrastive analysis of their collocation, colligation, semantic preference and semantic prosody based on the Ten-thousand English Compositions of Chinese Learners (TECCL Corpus) and Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The results show that adjective and verb are two major words frequently co-occurring with the group of synonyms, but only a few of them meet the default collocation criterion (frequency≥3, MI≥3), and many co-occurring words used by Chinese learners don’t appear in COCA. Besides, the co-occurring adjectives and verbs in TECCL are so diverse that they don’t establish fixed semantic relations as in COCA; therefore, there is a big difference in semantic preference and semantic prosody between Chinese learners and native speakers. With the advance of English proficiency, more collocates are used by college learners than middle school learners, but there is no clear and significant improvement in semantic preference and semantic prosody.
synonyms, corpus, contrastive study, semantic preference, semantic prosody
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