A Corpus-based Study on Semantic Prosody of English Synonyms Declare and Announce

摘要

Based on the data-based approach, a case study of a pair of synonyms, declare and announce, is conducted in this paper through searching COCA, aiming to reveal their different semantic prosodic features and witnesses the powerful vitality of corpus as a language research tool. Through retrieving significant collocates of these two synonyms and comparing their collocates in meaning and usage, this study found that declare generally collocates with words of negative prosody, whereas announce is normally accompanied by words which have the most distinctively strong neutral prosody. With results of this paper, it is hopeful to arouse EFL teachers’ attention on semantic prosody and make full use of corpus-based language teaching.