Abstract
This paper explored extensively the collocability and semantic prosody of the verbs of publicity in China’s English media, and then contrasted them with those in American newspapers. The purpose of the study is to disclose the attitudinal meanings from their linguistic performance. To that end, the Corpus of China’s English Media (CCEM) was built with 29,151,028 tokens, and the newspaper branch of COCA was used as a comparable corpus. All the col-locational patterns of the verbs were extracted from the two corpora, and they were further analyzed in great detail. The major findings of the study can be summarized as below: (1) The verbs of publicity are generally used more frequently in CCEM. (2) Chinese journalists tend to use some unique collocational patterns to describe some political, cultural or social concepts that are specific to China. (3) Chinese journalists have a preference for collocational patterns with a positive or neutral semantic prosody over those with a negative semantic prosody. These findings suggest that the attitudinal meanings could be worked out from the differences in collocational behaviors and semantic prosody between the texts in CCEM and COCA.
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Acknowledgement
This work was supported by a grant from the Humanities and Social Science Planning and Funding office of Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China under Grant No. 15YJA740048 (China English or Chinese English: A Study Based on China English Corpus), a grant from Guangdong Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Science (Grant No. GD14XWW20) and a grant from the Laboratory of Language Engineering and Computing of Guangdong University of Foreign Studies under the project entitled “A Study on Grammatical Nativization of China English” (Grant No. LEC2017ZBKT002). It was also part of the research achievements of the special innovation project entitled “A Study on the Definitions of Chinese-English Dictionaries for CFL Learners from the User’s Perspective” (Grant No. 2017WTSCX34) granted by the Department of Education of Guangdong Province.
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Huang, Q., Xia, L., Xia, Y. (2018). A Corpus-Based Study on Collocation and Semantic Prosody in China’s English Media: The Case of the Verbs of Publicity. In: Liu, C., Zou, L., Li, J. (eds) Database Systems for Advanced Applications. DASFAA 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10829. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91455-8_18
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