econdly, in China, the study of semantic prosody remains at the primary stage. Linguists have undertaken researches on the theory and application of semantic prosody and propose some constructive suggestions, which lay the foundation for the development of corpus linguistics and semantic prosody as well. Yet essential supplement researches are still needed, as few studies have paid adequate attention to contrastive studies on semantic prosody from a cross-linguistics perspective. What’s more, previous studies are mainly based on general English corpora or English learners’ corpora, while the specific context of Business English have long been ignored, which makes the discrimination of near-synonyms in business writing corpora a meaningful research topic.
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CHAPTER TWO LITERATURE REVIEW
Both synonymy and semantic prosody are concerned with how words relate to each other. In this chapter, a brief introduction of synonym and the types of synonymy is given first, and then the concepts of collocation, semantic preference and semantic prosody are reviewed. Also, previous studies of CAUSE-group verbs both in English and Chinese are discussed from a cross-linguistic perspective.
2.1 Synonymy
Synonymy has always been a hot topic of linguistic research. When it comes to the definition of synonymy, many linguists have different opinions. The definition of synonym in Merriam-Webster’s New Dictionary of Synonyms is “one or more words in the English language which have the same or very nearly the same essential meaning”. The Oxford Dictionary defines it as “a word or phrase that means exactly or nearly the same as another word or phrase in the same language”. Generally speaking, words or phrases are synonymous when they have the same meaning. However, in many cases, words or phrases bearing almost the same meaning may differ in connotations or implications. Hjorland (2007) claims that synonymy is a kind of semantic relationship, which means that words or phrases are synonymous only if they have the same meaning. However, lexical items may show subtle differences in their meanings and uses and therefore have different associations. Many researchers insist that absolute synonymies are rare in English. Tognini-Bonelli points out that even if “two words exist, their meanings tend to restrict themselves to specific areas of usage, operating in specialized contexts, with a specific collocational
