连和even构句的语用对比研究-a pragmatic comparative study of lian and even constructions.docxVIP

Ab Abstract II II Abstract The term semantic prosody was first used in print by Louw (1993a) who defined it as “the consistent aura of meaning with which a lexical item is imbued by its collocates”. Since semantic prosody has the pragmatic function of expressing attitudes and evaluating events, it is helpful and important to study semantic prosodies of Chinese and English corresponding words for better grasping the usages and distinctions. This thesis takes qualitative approach to study the similarities and differences of “连” and “even” in constructing sentences. By taking the corpus-based approach and retrieving 440 authentic instances respectively from the comparable corpora MCC (Modern Chinese Corpus) and COCA (The Corpus of Contemporary American English), this thesis contrasts and concludes semantic preference, semantic prosody and context of “连” and “even” in constructing sentences. Based on the contrastive study of the data, this thesis has the following conclusion. Firstly, it is found that “ 连 ” has negative semantic prosody while the English word “even” possesses mixed semantic prosody. Secondly, positive and negative meanings of sentences with these two words usually center on the right side of the node word, and neutral or mixed meanings are indicated by the whole sentence. A special pattern “连+X+也/都+Y” is adopted on the right side of the node word “连” to convey semantic meanings. For the node word “even”, its meanings are mainly expressed with verb phrases and adjective phrases. Thirdly, for semantic preference, there are some similarities and differences in the expression of phrases collocated with “连” and “even” in the same semantic meanings. Finally, contextual similarities for the use of “ 连 ” and “even” in the sentence lie in the emphases of history and PAGE PAGE IV background knowledge so as to reinforce the expression of semantic meanings. For contextual differences, the node word “ 连 ” is adopted to underline the facto