A Case Study of Prosody of Chinese Synonyms
Abstract
Semantic prosody, an important factor in the study of modern collocation, plays an important role in the Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language (TCFL). By using retrieving function of online corpora and software, AntConc3.2.4w, this research compares the collocation and prosodies of two synonyms, "tiao" (choose) and "xuan" (select), in a large scale Chinese corpus BLCU Corpus Center (BCC) and an interlanguage corpus HUAYU. It is found that in the corpus of native speakers, "xuan" sometimes collocates abstract and negative nouns while "tiao" appears with concrete and neutral ones. However, foreign learners are confused by these synonyms, always using them with concrete and neutral nouns. This research also proves that the application of semantic prosody can enrich the content of lexical research and innovate vocabulary teaching methods in TCFL.
Keywords
Prosody, Synonyms, Corpus, Language Teaching
DOI
10.12783/dtssehs/esem2019/29775
10.12783/dtssehs/esem2019/29775