近義名詞在COCA 中的語意韻律與語意偏好之用法

Analyzing the Semantic Prosody and Semantic Preference of Three Synonymous Noun Pairs in COCA

在詞彙研究中一個眾所週知的觀念是字彙事實上包含了許多的字串， 其中最重 要的一種即為字詞的搭配。自從Sinclair於1991年指出某些字經常結合負面的意義， 而其他字卻不見得如此，造成之後的研究學者越來越注意「語意韻律」這個觀念在 字詞搭配學習上的重要性。同義詞組無疑的對英語為外語學習者構成特殊的學習障 礙，主要原因即為他們彼此之間相近的意義但是卻無法相互交替使用的語意韻律（如 strong tea vs. powerful car）。另外語料庫(corpus) 及索引文(concordance lines) 的使用 也造就了今日語料庫語言學的風行。同時學者也發現同義詞組在語意用法上的差異 最能夠透過他們在字詞搭配的典型模式來彰顯， 而語料庫分析往往正是一種能夠有 效的區分同義詞組彼此不同的工具以及幫助外語學習者掌握語意使用上的特定模式 (Liu， 2013b)。本語料庫研究打算比較並分析2013年最新的學術單字核心表單中 (Gardner & Davies， 2013)的三組近義名詞來藉以得知他們在九種不同學術領域之論 文中的語意偏好及語意韻律之模式。本研究採用的語料庫為當代美國英文語料庫中 的學術性文章(COCA)。本研究主要目的為希望藉此研究成果提供非英語系國家的研 究學者們一些辨識學術文章中語意韻律上的協助，同時藉由瞭解經常易混淆同義字 組的差異性，並進而掌握及精進自身學術的專業表達能力。

The present corpus-based study aims to compare the collocational behavior and semantic prosody of three synonymous noun pairs from the new Academic Vocabulary Core List (Gardner & Davies， 2013) by examining the academic texts in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). After the word pairs were picked up for comparison， all the data were analyzed manually in the following procedure. First， the definitions of the synonymous word pairs were checked against Collins Online Thesaurus of American English to ensure that each pair has a shared meaning. Second， the concordance lines were examined within a span of 4 words to both the left and right to observe the semantic preference and semantic prosody of the synonymous word pairs. Third， the concordance lines and frequency of occurrence were compared across different academic sub-fields to see if the pairs are used differently in various disciplines. Finally the data were cross-checked to discern the semantic-prosodic patterns between the synonymous word pairs. Implications were also discussed at the end.