II. Theoretical Framework
1. Theory of semantic prosody, collocation, colligation and their relationships. 2. Corpus linguistics. 3. Statistics
III. Research Questions


After the lexical items are selected, Wordsmith is used to extract the keywords with its concordance lines at a span of 5:5. Then colligations are established based on the observation of the concordances. Within the colligations, semantic prosodic behavior of the items are interpreted and concluded. In this course, both quantitative computation and qualitative selection are applied to statistical analysis. Chi-square test will be carried out to examine the significance of the difference.
V. Research Methodology
1. Instruments Wordsmith will be used to extract the desired occurrences of the target item. Besides, SPSS will also be used to carry out chi-square tests for explaining the differences in the output of the Wordsmith program.
IV. Research Significance
1. The article is hoped to be of some help and reference to the graduate students. 2. It may also provide implications about English vocabulary instruction, dictionary compilation, as well as the application of corpora to second language learning.
5.
EFL learners' constructing grammatically correct but unnatural and unacceptable sentences have gradually shifted scholars' sights from traditional grammar to lexico-grammar. The former emphasizes the mastery of syntactic rules, but the latter advocates that form, meaning and function are associated. So to approach a word and its use from lexico-grammar perspective, one has to consider the immediate linguistic context, i.e. the grammatical and lexical patterns for the word.
A Contrastive Study of Semantic Prosody and Colligation in Two Corpora ——the Master’s Dissertations of Faculty of International Studies in Henan Normal University and Academic Dissertations of Native English Scholars
VI. The Outline of the Thesis
Chapter 1 Introduction 1.1 Background and Aims of the Present Study 1.2 General Organization of the Thesis Chapter 2 Literature Review 2.1 Theory about Collocation 2.2.1 Concept of Collocation 2.2.2 Combinations of Grammar and Lexis 2.2.3 Importance of Collocation to Language Learning 2.2 Review of Semantic Prosody 2.3 Review of Colligation 2.3.1 Concept of Colligation 2.3.2 Classification of Colligation 2.4 Interrelationship of Collocation, Semantic Prosody and Colligation
By xxx A proposal submitted to the supervisors committee Faculty of International Studies In Henan Normal University Mar.24, 2007
Thesis statement I. Research Motivation
2. Data Collection The Master’s dissertations will be collected from Faculty of International Studies in Henan Normal University (MH) and the dissertations from native English scholars (AD) will be collected from Internet, which has been tested availably. The size of the two corpora is about 1,000,000 words, if necessary, add as many as possible.
3. Research Procedure Firstly, make a contrastive study of semantic prosody and colligation, and semantic prosody is rarely accessible to speakers' intuitions and can only be discovered on the basis of consistent collocation patterns in large corpora. All the studies so far mainly deal with one or several words that seem to be randomly selected, that is, a word-by-word inspection. All together, only dozens of words have been proved to carry an obvious negative or positive semantic prosody. Therefore, a reliable way to approach semantic prosody in a non-native corpus is to study those words whose semantic prosodies have been revealed.
Based on this principle, the four lexical items chosen for the present study are two verbs, happen and incur, and two nouns, career and effect. They are chosen for the following reasons. First, they have been proved to carry obvious semantic prosody by previous research, which we can both make a basis on and a comparison with. Second, nouns and verbs have more variations of colligation comparing with other grammatical forms. This may provide us more chances to detect any difference.
1. Are there significant discrepancies on semantic prosody and colligation in two corpora? If there are, what are they? 2. Are there any abnormal collocations? If there are, what are they? and why? misapplied, or deliberate?
2.5 Role of Corpus in the Study 2.5.1 The History of Corpus Linguistics 2.5.2 Use of Corpora in the Analysis of Collocation, Semantic Prosody and Colligation 2.5.3 Key Terms of Corpus Used in the Present Study Chapter 3 Methodology 3.1 Instrument 3.2 Data Collection 3.3 Research Procedure Chapter 4 Results of Corpora Inspection and Analysis 4.1 Study of happen 4.1.1. Semantic Prosody of happen 4.1.1.1 Happen in MH 4.1.1.2 Happen in AD 4.1.2. Colligations of happen