中国英语学习者使用totally一词语义韵.docVIP

中国英语学习者使用totally一词语义韵 　　【Abstract】This study tries to reveal the semantic prosody of the word totally in Chinese learners written English in comparison with native English speakers by examining the semantic prosodic features of totally in Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners and Corpus of Contemporary American English. The study shows that Chinese Learners show significant differences with native English speakers for the word totally. The possible reasons for the differences may lie in negative language transfer. 　　【Keywords】semantic prosody；corpus；totally 　　1. Introduction 　　Semantic prosody focuses on the mutual influence of words in one sentence through the study of language collocation. Native English speakers， through long time using of mother language， can hardly use words with wrong semantic prosody. However， this may not be true when it comes to Chinese EFL learners who are often not aware of the collocation of English words. This paper tries to reveal the semantic prosody of the word “totally” in Chinese learners’ English through the comparison of native English speakers’. The Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese learners and Corpus of Contemporary American English are adopted in this paper. 　　2. Semantic Prosody 　　Semantic prosody refers to the phenomenon that collocates before or after a word tend to form a specific semantic category with the same emotional significance. The term “semantic prosody” is coined and defined by Bill Louw. According to him， semantic prosody is “a consistent aura of meaning with which a form is imbued by its collocates.” （Louw， 1993） Sinclair reveals that the word happen habitually collocates with unpleasant events， such as accidents happen， something terrible has happened， etc. So he describes the phenomenon that “many use of words and phrases show a tendency to occur in a certain semantic environment.” （Sinclair， 2003） 　　Stubbs （1995） classifies semantic prosody into three categories in his works， nam