期刊文章分类查询,尽在期刊图书馆 向贵（武汉理工大学，外国语学院）
【Abstract】With the continuous development and progress of the society, English is the main international language in the world today. It is also the most widely used language in the world. English learning is still very important, vocabulary is the foundation of English learning. Vocabulary learning plays an important role in the study of English. If one does not grasp vocabulary, it is impossible for him or her to carry out listening, speaking, reading and writing, let alone communicate in English. Whether in the exam or in daily communication, we find it easy to confuse words with similar meanings. How to choose the right words becomes a challenge. Semantic prosody is a feature shared by all languages. The emergence of corpus makes us see the dawn of its research, we can use it to distinguish some synonymous words that are easy to confuse.
【Key Words】semantic prosody; corpus; English mixed synonym; vocabulary teaching
中图分类号：G683.88文献标识码：A文章编号：ISSN0257-2826（2019）12-231-01
1. Introduction
The theoretical study of semantic rhyme is relatively less empirical study. After Sinclair proposed the phenomenon of semantic rhyme, his student Sinclair further promoted the concept of phonetic rhythm for vocabulary research, and the concept of semantic rhyme came into being. Once the semantic rhyme is proposed, it has always attracted the attention of researchers at home and abroad. They have conducted much research on semantic rhyme and achieved fruitful results. In empirical research, there are many corpus-based researches, such as Wang Haihua and Wang Tongshun (2005), “Comparative study the semantic rhyme of the word cause” Pan Pan and Feng Yuejin (2003) “The Semantic Survey and Applied Research of Semantic Prosody”.English vocabulary teaching is the core of teaching. Some easy-confusing synonyms are the difficult point of vocabulary teaching. Traditional vocabulary teaching rarely involves semantic prosody. Mastering semantic rhythm is beneficial to us to distinguish some easy-confusing synonyms. Semantic prosody is difficult to distinguish by human intuition. The corpus can help us analyze the semantic rhythm because of its huge data. This paper briefly analyzes this.
2. The concept and importance of semantic prosody
2.1What is the semantic prosody?
Semantic prosody is a kind of collocation phenomenon, which refers to a semantic color produced by certain words because they are often co-occurring with language units with certain semantic features. This semantic color may be positive, pleasing, or negative and negating, but most words are neutral. If a word is in the positive semantic rhyme, it can show positive semantic features. In the negative semantic rhyme, of course it can show negative semantic features. In the neutral semantic rhyme, it is expressed as a semantic feature of positive meaning or a semantic feature of negative meaning.
There are currently two definitions of semantic prosody, which is defined by Louw : A consistent aura of meaning with which a form is imbued by its collocates is referred to as a semantic prosody. Partington defines the semantic prosody as: Semantic prosody refers to the spreading of connotational colouring beyond single word boundaries.
As can be seen from their definition, the semantic rhythm has two characteristics: one is the close relationship between the semantic rhythm and its collocation. The emotional tendency embodied by a certain word is actually that it usually co-occurs with a fixed collocation, thus forming a result of a habitual default association. This association is sometimes automatic and subconscious, so people have a feeling of semantic rhythm but it is difficult to describe, and the corpus retrieval results can visually present the semantic rhythm. The second characteristic of semantic rhythm is its relative stability. Semantic prosody is given by the collocation of a certain word, and this term obtains the specific emotional association from the collocation, and basically maintains the semantic rhythm in a certain time range, which does not change much.
The rhythm was originally proposed by Firth to summarize the specific phonological phenomena of segmental elements in speech studies with super-segmentation features in the flow. The same phoneme, in different voice environments, often exhibits different phonological characteristics, forming a different phoneme variant different from the phoneme prototype, and different variants of the same phoneme constitute a complementary system. For example, the phoneme/t/ is a puffing sound of aspiration, but in the words such as stop, the voice feature of aspiration is lost due to the influence of the /s/ of the previous position. Although /t/ is no longer aspirating after /s/, this form of non-aspirate is only a variant of/t/ in this specific speech environment (that is to say with the previous position / s /). In phonology, such as assimilation (alienation), continuous reading, etc., Firth thinks that they belong to the category of rhythm.
Firth argues that: (1) The phoneme is only a citation form of a specific phonetic segmentation component and is the subject of theoretical phonetic research (when acting as a citation, it is generally used). The form is often referred to as a prototype in cognitive linguistics; (2) Prosody refers to a variant of the phonetic segmentation component in a specific speech environment, because the phonetic environment has mandatory restrictions on the phoneme; (3) Therefore, rhythm should become the focus of linguistics, especially applied linguistics, because it is dynamic, is the basic form of language, reveals the essential laws of language application, and studies language, especially language communication. And language acquisition is especially important.
It can be seen that the rhythm concept proposed by Firth is limited to the rhythm in the sense of phonology. But his view of "environmental restrictions on the composition of the ingredients" has a great impact on future linguists. His student J. Sinclair inherited his theory of language education and extended the scope of the rhythm. He believes that rhythm is not limited to phonetics, but also has similar phenomena at the lexical level. His years of experience in compiling lexicons made him realize that lexical meaning is closely related to his use environment. Sometimes the meaning of words is actually the collocation meaning of vocabulary. Therefore, he pays special attention to collocation research of vocabulary.
2.2 The importance of semantic rhythm to vocabulary research
Human communication is done through sentences, and vocabulary is the basis of sentences. If one does not understand vocabulary. It is impossible to carry out reading and writing. It is also impossible for him or to communicate with foreigners. Therefore, vocabulary learning is the basis for learning English. Therefore, the more vocabulary you master, the better it is for you to master the language of English. The understanding and correct application of synonyms is a difficult and important point in the process of English vocabulary teaching. In the actual teaching process, teachers often pay attention to sentence structure, language form, pronunciation and grammar. The requirements for vocabulary often only require students to memorize several fixed collocations and basic semantics. The importance of vocabulary teaching does not get a full understanding and mastering. The study of vocabulary teaching is beneficial to improve teachers' basic ability, teaching quality and teaching effect. At the same time, the process of vocabulary learning is also the process of developing students' intelligence. English synonym refers to a group of English words with the same meaning. There are a large number of synonyms in English. Because synonyms are similar or extremely similar, it is easy to confuse English learners. This is often a difficult point in English vocabulary learning. Some English synonyms have the same basic meaning, but the connotation of the meaning is sometimes different. We must carefully observe the meaning and usage of each word in different contexts on the basis of extensive reading, so as to learn to use it correctly, correct understanding of the basic usage of English synonyms can improve our reading and expression skills. When we are teaching, or when we are in the exam, or in communication, we find that when we encounter some synonymous words that are easy to confuse, it is difficult to choose the correct words.
Semantic prosody has certain guiding significance for vocabulary teaching. For example, “lead to”,” cause” has similar meanings, but their use is different. We can distinguish their differences if we know well about the semantic prosody . As a teacher, we can guide students to pay attention to the semantic rhythm of some words or phrases, and guide them to summarize the semantic rhythm of easy-mixed synonyms, which will help them accurately grasp English synonyms and use them accurately in different contexts.
3. The definition and classification of synonyms
3.1The definition of synonyms
Synonym refers to two or more words expressing the same meaning or concept. “A word having the same meaning as another word, as one of two or more words of the same language and grammatical category having the same essential or genetic meaning and differing only in connotation ,application or idiomatic use, one of two or more words having essentially identical definition.”
3.2Classification of synonyms
In general, synonyms can be divided into absolute synonyms and relative synonyms.
3.2.1 Absolute Synonyms
Synonyms that have no semantic differences and are completely interchangeable in application are absolute synonyms. Forexample, “word-formation” and “word-building”, they have the same concept and are completely interchangeable when used. Similar words include “mother tongue” and “native language”, “heart disease” and “cardiopathy”, “malnutrition” and “undernourishment”, “scarlet fever “and “scarlatina”, “composition” and “compounding”, “mercury” and “quicksilver”,“breathed consonant” and “voiceless consonant” and so on.
3.2.2 Relative synonyms
Relative synonyms are also called partial synonyms, that is, words with the same or similar basic meaning.
(1) Semantic differences
Some synonyms are used to express the same concept, but there are subtle differences in semantics. For example, “condense”, “compress”, “contract”, “shrink” all contain the meaning of "shrinking, compressing". “Conduce” refers to compressing things more tightly and compactly without losing the original content. “Compress” refers to pressing a messy and unformed thing into a shape. “Contract” mainly refers to the tightening of internal and external forces, and can also be used as an extension. “Shrinking” refers to the length, volume, or volume that is not achieved due to shrinkage. Another example is “acknowledge”, “admit”, “confess”, “recognize”, and “concede”,these verbs all contain the meaning of "recognition". “Acknowledge” usually refers to the public recognition of something or its own fault. “Admit” emphasizes the explicit recognition of external forces or consciences or judgments, and is often reluctant or forced. “Confess”has a strong tone and emphasizes the mistakes or crimes that he realizes. “Recognize” is a written term that refers primarily to legal or diplomatic recognition. “Concede” means reluctance or having to admit in the face of facts and evidence. There are many similar examples, and I won't go into details here.
(2) emotional differences
Synonyms based on emotional differences may include commendatory ones, neutral ones, and derogatory ones. For example, “famous”, “noted”, “notorious”, these adjectives all contain the meaning of "famous, well-known."“Famous”is a common term used to refer to people or things that spread a lot and attract people's attention. “Noted”mainly refers to expert or authority and work that has received much attention due to outstanding performance, sometimes it is derogatory. “Notorious” means notorious for being inferior, with strong derogatory meaning. Another example is, the nouns, “noise”, “sound”, and “voice” all contain the meaning of "sound."“Noise” usually refers to an unpleasant, annoying noise, impliedderogatory meaning. “Sound”,common term, generally refers to the various sounds that people can hear, it is neutral. “Voice” refers to the sound of a person’s speaking or singing.
(3) Style differences
Different synonyms appear in different styles. Such as formal language, informal language, slang, conversational, casual, and so on. For example, “upset”, “perturb”，these two verbs have the meaning of "uneasy, upset". “Upset” is the most common and popular word, focusing on losing spiritual calm and completely losing balance in psychology. “Perturb” is written vocabulary means that people are anxious and annoyed. Another example is “call”, “summon”. These two verbscontain the meaning of "calling, summoning". “Call” isinformal term, refers to summoning in the form of a speech or a call. “Summon” is formal term, refers to an official or formal convening, and the convener has power or authority.
(4) Differences in matching
There are differences in the use of synonyms. For example, “a flock of sheep”, “a herd of cows”, “a school of whales” and another example is “solve a problem”, “overcome a difficulty”, “settle a dispute”.
4. the corpus research method
4.1 Introduction to the corpus
The term corpus linguistics first appeared in the early 1980s, corpus-based language study has a substantial history. The corpus dates back to the pre-Chomskyan period. The basic corpus methodology was widespread in linguistics in the early 20th century. From the 1980s onwards, the number and size of corpora and corpus-based studies have increased dramatically. Corpus refers to a large collection of well-sampled and processed electronic texts, on which language studies, theoretical or applied, can be conducted with the aid of computer tools. Corpus is the basic resource for corpus linguistic research and the main source of empirical language research methods. It is used in lexicography, language teaching, traditional language research, and statistical or case-based research in natural language processing. There are many types of corpora, and the main basis for determining the type is its research purpose and usage, which can often be reflected in the principles and methods of corpus collection. Some people have divided the corpus into four types: (1) Heterogeneous: There is no specific corpus collection principle, and various corpora are widely collected and stored as such; (2) Homogeneous: only collect corpus of the same content; (3) Systematic: Collecting corpus according to predetermined principles and proportions, making the corpus balanced and systematic, capable of representing a certain range of linguistic facts; (4) Specialized: only collected for a specific use Corpus. In addition, according to the language of the corpus, the corpus can also be divided into Monolingual, Bilingual and Multilingual. According to the collection unit of corpus, the corpus can be divided into discourse, sentence, and phrase. Bilingual and multilingual corpora can be divided into parallel (aligned) corpus and comparative corpus according to the corpus organization form. The corpus of the former constitutes the translation relationship, which is mostly used in application fields such as machine translation and bilingual dictionary compilation. The latter will express the same content. Different language texts are collected together and used for language comparison studies. A large number of various types of corpora have been accumulated, such as: Portuguese language tree library, Chinese and English news classification corpus for text classification research, Reuters text classification training corpus, Chinese text classification corpus, multi-language parallel data of Open Subtitles Corpus , "Bible" bilingual corpus, short messages service (SMS) corpus .
4.2 Using the corpus to study the semantic prosody
The semantic rhythm of a word is difficult to find, and the emergence of corpus provides a large amount of data for the semantic prosody of our research words. By studying and analyzing the corpus, we can reveal the semantic rhythm of some confusing vocabulary, which we can search through corpus software. With the vocabulary matching, such as Oxford English Software, BNC, we can retrieve the sentence containing a certain vocabulary. By analyzing its collocation, we can get the semantic rhyme of the word, whether it is negative, positive or neutral. This way we can know what words it should match, which means that it is correct to use the vocabulary in what context. Traditional teacher-centered teaching methods have many areas to improve. With the flourishing development of corpus linguistics, the phenomenon of semantic rhyme has been paid more and more attention. The research on semantic rhyme based on corpus provides new ideas for vocabulary research, and second language acquisition, etc. It also has important guiding significance for vocabulary teaching.
The following are the collocations of “break out”, “occur”,” happen”, “take place” retrieved by BNC. The following are the most frequently occurring collocations. By comparing the commonalities and differences between collocations, we can summarize their semantic rhyme.
1. at all. I know I'm sorry for a war having to break out, and the youngsters out there having to isk
2. en siblings can be observed, and if fightsbreak out the method of handling by the parents provides
3. police of complicity in the latest fighting to break out at the Cape Town squatter camp, Crossroads.
4. st the taxpayer a fortune. The fire did not break out in a deserted building in the middle of nowhere
5. ith Latin America as part of its attempt to break out of what was perceived as an economic blockade
6.f panic that the revolution was about to break out. When, in August 1920, the threat of British
7. aring contrast to the cold sweat he felt break out on his brow. Then he felt a cloth being held against
8. 15 minutes gone Airdrie were able to break out into attack for the first time and Hearts' experienced
We can retrieve the collocation of “break out”through the BNC, we found that the total use frequency of its collocation is 150 times, including “war” 18 times, “fights” 5 times, “fighting”3 times, “fire” 3 times, “attempt” 3 times, “revolution” 3 times, “sweat” 3 times, “attack” 2 times, through calculation, we can get “war”accounted for 12.00%, “fights” accounted for 3.33%, “fighting” accounted for 2.00%, “fire” accounted for 2.00%, “attempt” accounted for 2.00%, “revolution” accounted for 2.00%, “sweat” accounted for 2.00%, “attack” accounted for 1.33%.
1.quickly. Nevertheless, changes constantly occur as isshown by a cursory glance at the developmen
2.ment expect that the biggest problems will occur among unions on the left who have fostered close t
3.keep your Grace informed of what events occur. We are acceptable to the Scottish court, being friend
4 happy creasing of the face took a time to occur. Then Annabel, actual Annabel, broke into the night by
5. us!' This was exactly the result that did occur. Brownie Owl broke the grim news to the Brownies the
6.e of the most common accidents which occur in this age group, and in conjunction with Age Concern,
7. y to melt. Later on, similar conditions occur whenever a fresh snowfall is followed by a sudden chang
8.pulation is small, type II errors may occur. Even if the study population is large, however, the additiona
We can retrieve the collocation of “occur”through the BNC, we found that the total frequency of its collocations was 2,393 times, including “changes” of 145 times, 104 times of “problems”, “events” of 65 times, “time” of 63 times, “results” of 48 times, “accidents” of 43 times, “conditions” of 43 times, and “errors” of 36 times. By calculation, we can get “changes” of 6.05%, “problems” of 4.35%, “events” of 2.71%, “time” of 2.63%, “result” of 2.01%, “accidents” of 1.80%, “conditions” of 1.80%, and “errors” of 1.50%.
1.or fight. And certain things are going to happen in his body to help him to cope with that situation.
2. going. I'm not quite sure what's going to happen to all the people that are unemployed because of this
3. in the prevailing wind. Such changes do happen when we are dealing with a timescale as long as the
4. bears the truth. If the same thing was to happen tonight, I wouldn't mind being a fly on the wall in the
5 .t that I say that a lot of these accidents happen because perhaps you're not paying the attention, very
6. improbable events that do sometimes happen, including any one individual's being struck by lightning
7.always more or less. This time I made it happen, I think.' Her voice was blurred. The children were jolly
8.eadline. So that's usually the way things happen, the president can't spell out things and dot the Is an
We can retrieve the collocation of “happen” through the BNC, we found that the total frequency of its collocations was 2382 times, including “things”504 times, “thing”195 times， “people”96 times，”time” 95 times，”accidents” 80 times，”way” 60 times，”events” 31 times，”changes” 28 times. By calculation, we can conclude that “things” is 21.16%, “thing” is 8.19%, “people” is 4.03%, “time” is 3.99%, “accidents” is 3.36%, “way” is 2.52%, “events” is 1.30%, and “changes”is 1.18%.
1. st recently, and these are changes that take place whatever you do, you can exercise, and you can ta
2.The official inaugural meeting did not take place until October when the room had been open six mont
3. lk Festivals'. Overall, 600 events will take place ranging from Flamenco dancing, Welsh harpers, a pl
4. r, which is that a development could take place within that district, even where areas have not yet be
5. r extra trade fair discount! Other fairs take place throughout the year and some suppliers show at the
6. de er, a base where activities could take place in that area, but whilst not, if you like, not directly ben
7. e French legislative elections due to take place at the end of this month but, regardless of who wins, t
8.so far as is possible, the event can take place with as little dislocation to the ordinary life of the comm
We can retrieve the collocation of “take place” through the BNC, we found that the total frequency of its collocation was 1496 times, including 68 times “changes”, “meeting” 52 times, “events” 49 times, “development” 45 times, “year” 44 times, “activities” 32 times, “elections” 32 times, “Event” 29 times, through calculation, we can get “changes” accounted for 4.55%, “meeting” accounted for 3.48%, “events” accounted for 3.28%, “development” accounted for 3.01%, “year” accounted for 2.94%, “activities” accounted for 2.14%, “elections” accounted for 2.14%, and “event” accounted for 1.94%.
It is not difficult to see that the high frequency words associated with “break out” include war, fights, fighting, fire, attempt, revolution, sweat, attack, where war, fights, fighting, fire, attack contain negative rhythm, attack, revolution, sweat contain Neutral rhythm; high frequency words associated with “occur “include changes, problems, events, time, result, accidents, conditions, errors, where problems, accidents, errors contain negative rhythms, changes, events, time, result, conditions with neutral Rhythm; high frequency words associated with “happen” include things, people, changes, thing, accidents, events, time, way, where accidents contain negative rhymes, while changes, things, people, thing, events, time, way are Sex words; high frequency words associated with “take place” include changes, meetings, events, development, year, activities, elections, events, where development contains positive rhymes, changes, meeting, events, year, activities, elections, events are Neutral word. So the negative and positive sorting of these four words is break out, occur, happen and take place. When using them, we can match the appropriate words according to their semantic rhythm. Of course, we can also judge a sentence. Whether the matching of these words is accurate or not. These words are just the epitome of easy-mixed synonyms. We can use the same method to summarize the semantic rhythms of other synonymous words that are easy to confuse. As a teacher, we can teach the semantic rhythm to our students and remind them to pay attention to the accumulation of the semantic rhythm.
Conclusion
The main purpose of foreign language teaching is not only for educational purposes, but also for successful language communication, without understanding of the semantic prosody features, misuse of words can lead to educational failure and also failure of language communication to a certain extent. The emergence of semantic prosody provides a new model and method for further exploring the various constraints of English collocation. It shows great potential in many ways. The existing research based on semantic rhyme finds that there is a significant difference between the typical collocations used by Chinese language learners and native speakers. Therefore, in the aspect of English teaching, the learners should gradually establish their awareness of the semantic rhythm phenomenon, and guide them to pay attention to the collocation behavior of the comparison words or phrases and accumulate relevant knowledge. In the past, due to the limitations of technical means, it is impossible to carry out in-depth and meticulous research on semantic prosody. Now, with the power of corpus, we can quantify and qualitatively analyze the semantic prosody that can only be used in the past. Using corpus to study the semantic rhythm and apply it to teaching will definitely improve our teaching and make our teaching to a higher level.
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论文作者: 向贵
论文发表刊物:《教学与研究》2019年12期
论文发表时间:2019/11/21
标签：期刊论文; 尽在论文; 文章分类论文; 外国语学院论文; 文献论文; 中图分类号论文; 标识码论文; 《教学与研究》2019年12期论文;