DOI: 10.5176/2251-3566_L31265
Authors: Meixia Li and Aihui Jiao
Abstract: In Chinese, such expressions as “yinwei … suoyi” (“因为…所以”, “because…so”） “zaochengle” (“造成了”, “lead to”), “yuanyinshi” (“原因是”, “The reason is…”), etc. are frequently employed to express cause and effect relationship, which is called logical resultative formulae. These formulae are the fixed linguistic expressions of man’s cognition of causal relations between two events. However, in communication, these expressions tend to collocate with a certain lexical items which possess the same or similar semantic features of the same category or multiple categories, thus forming semantic prosodies, namely, they can express a certain semantic preference. However, until now, a lot have done about the conjunctive functions of these Chinese logical resultative formulae, and less has done about the semantic prosody of Chinese logical resultative formulae. Therefore, based upon the analysis of large corpus, the present article attempts to make a deep investigation into different semantic prosodies that various Chinese logical resultative formulae carry, so as to shed a new light on avoiding bad diction while expressing cause and effect relations in Chinese or translating such relations between English and Chinese.
Keywords: logical resultative formulae; colligation; collocabilty; semantic prosody; corpus-based
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