A Corpus-based Study on Colligation and Semantic Prosody in Chinese Government Work Reports

The Case of “V + Reform”

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6463-262-0_105How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Semantic prosody; Chinese Government Work Reports; Colligation; Collocation; Path metaphor; Lexical priming

Abstract

This paper explored the colligation of “V + Reform” and the semantic prosody of “reform” in the corpus of Chinese Government Work Reports (GWRs) from 2013 to 2022 built with 146087 tokens, and then contrasted the results with those in American State of the Union Addresses (SOTUs) with the purpose of disclosing the subjective and objective reasons that influence its semantic prosody. All the collocation patterns of the colligation are extracted and analyzed in groups based on the theory of lexical priming. The major findings include (1) compared to the English native text, the “path” metaphor pattern and the “Ongoing” stage of “reform” are overwhelmingly prevalent in GWRs, while the proportions of “Before” and “Beginning” stages are relatively low. (2) The multi-dimensional connotations of the word “reform” itself and the historical actions of the Chinese government contribute to the unusually high proportion of the “Ongoing” semantic prosody of the word “reform.” (3) The deliberate use of non-native collocations in the official translation of GWRs reflects China’s political intention of shaping its national image and “convey the voice of China to the world.”

Copyright

© 2024 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Lei Chen
AU  - Hongjiang Liu
PY  - 2023
DA  - 2023/10/09
TI  - A Corpus-based Study on Colligation and Semantic Prosody in Chinese Government Work Reports
BT  - Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Management Science and Software Engineering (ICMSSE 2023)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 1024
EP  - 1041
SN  - 2589-4943
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-262-0_105
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6463-262-0_105
ID  - Chen2023
ER  -