Limitations and Future Study

國

立 政 治 大 學

‧

N a tio na

l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y

85

themes to bring out the negative prosody. The themes they collocate with are inhumane or illegal to trade for. It suggests that when people refer to an illegal transaction, they tend to choose the words, maimai or jiaoyi. In the right-sided collocation, maoyi has the tendency to collocate with negative nouns or verbs. They indicate that the situation or problem of the transaction is in an unfavorable condition.

5.2 Limitations and Future Study

Some limitations and issues in the study still have the room for improvement or for future study. First of all, the judgement of semantic prosodies tends to be too subjective. Since the semantic prosodies refer to the connotation brought out between the words, they tend to rely more on personal feelings or opinions. In the present study, we merely focus on the semantic prosodies of the collocates and their

combinations with maimai, jiaoyi or maoyi. However, their usages within a context can influence their semantic prosodies. Therefore, to examine the semantic prosodies from a wider stretch of context should be taken into account for further study. Second, the collocational behaviors lack strong statistical evidence and support. In the present study we only count the frequencies to be the standard of collocation; however, it is possible that the collocates simply have more frequencies in the corpus. As a result,

‧ 國

立 政 治 大 學

‧

N a tio na

l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y

86

the chance of co-occurring with maimai, jiaoyi or maoyi is higher than other words.

Therefore, it will be statistically persuasive if the study provides one of the statistical tests to measure the collocational strength. Third, from the data we have found that there are some words showing high tendency to co-occur with certain words such as xing jiaoyi ‘sex transaction’ (性交易), or seqing jiaoyi ‘sex transaction’ (色情交易).

In addition to the phenomenon of collocation, one possible explanation is that these terms are going through the process of lexicalization. Such an issue is interesting to be further explored and investigated in future research.

‧

Bednarek, M. (2008). Semantic preference and semantic prosody re-examined.Corpus linguistics and linguistic theory, 4(2), 119-139.

Chief, L. C., Huang, C. R., Chen, K. J., Tsai, M. C., & Chang, L. L. (2000). What can near synonyms tell us. International Journal of Computational Linguistics and Chinese Language Processing, 5(1), 47-60.

Chung, Siaw-Fong (2011). A Corpus-based Analysis of "Create" and "Produce".

Chang Gung Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 4(2), 399-425.

Fillmore, C. J. (1977). Topics in lexical semantics. In R. Cole, (Eds.), Current issues in linguistic theory (pp. 76-138). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Fillmore, C. J. (1982). Frame semantics. In Linguistics Society of Korea (Eds.), Linguistics in the morning calm (pp. 111-137). Seoul: Hanshin Publishing Company.

Fillmore, C. J., & Atkins, B. T. (1992). Toward a frame-based lexicon: The semantics of RISK and its neighbors. In Lehrer, A. & Kittay, E.F (Eds.) Frames, fields, and contrasts: New essays in semantic and lexical organization (pp.75-102).

Hillsdale: Lawerence Erlbaum Associates.

Firth, J. R. (1957). Modes of meaning. In Firth, J. R. (Eds.) Papers in Linguistics 1934-1951 (pp. 190-215). London: Oxford University Press.

Hoey, M. (1991). Patterns of lexis in text. London: Oxford University Press.

Hoey, M. (2005). Lexical priming: A new theory of words and language. Psychology Press.

Hsu, You-Fen & Chung, Siaw-Fong. 2012. A Corpus-Based Study of Mandarin Soaking Verbs PÀO and JÌN. International Journal of Computer Processing of Languages (IJCPOL), 24(1), 17-36, (CSA).

Huang, C. R., Ahrens, K., Chang, L. L., Chen, K. J., Liu, M. C., & Tsai, M. C. (2000).

The module-attribute representation of verbal semantics: From semantics to argument structure. Computational Linguistics and Chinese Language Processing, 5(1), 19-46.

‧

Leech, G. (1974). Semantics. Harmondsworth : Penguin.

Lin, Po-Chung (2009). Patterns of Profiling of the (In)convenience Frame in

Mandarin Chinese (Unpublished master’s thesis). National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan.

Liu, Mei-chun (2002). Corpus-based Lexical Semantic Study of Verbs of Doubt:

HUAIYI and CAI in Mandarin. Concentrics, 28(2), 43-56.

Liu, Mei-chun, Chiang, Ting-yi & Chou, Ming-Hui (2006). A Frame-based Approach to Polysemous Near-synonymy: The Case with Mandarin Verbs of Expression.

Journal of Chinese Language and Computing, 15(3), 137-148.

Liu, Yue-hua, Pan, Wen-yu, Gu wei (2001). Shiyong xiandai hanyu yufa (zengding ben) [Modern Chinese Gammar]. Beijing: The Commercial Press.

Louw, B. (1993). Irony in the text or insincerity in the writer? The diagnostic potential of semantic prosodies. In Baker, M., Francis, G. & Tognini-Bonelli, E. (Eds.) Text and technology: In honour of John Sinclair (pp. 157-176). John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Lyons, J. (1981). Language, Meaning, and Context. London: Fontana.

Packard, J. L. (2000). The morphology of Chinese: A linguistic and cognitive approach. Cambridge University Press.

Partington, A. (1998). Patterns and meanings:using corpora for English language research and teaching [Vol. 2]. John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Partington, A. (2004). " Utterly content in each other's company": Semantic prosody and semantic preference. International journal of corpus linguistics, 9(1), 131-156.

Petruck, M. R. (1996). Frame semantics. In Verschueren, J., Ostman, J., Blommaert, J.

& Bulcaen, C. (Eds.) Handbook of pragmatics (pp.1-13). John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Sardinha, T. (2000). Semantic prosodies in English and Portuguese: A contrastive study. Cuadernos de Filología Inglesa, 9(1), 93-110.

Sinclair, J. M. (1991). Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford University Press.

‧ 國

立 政 治 大 學

‧

N a tio na

l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y

89

Sinclair, J. M. (Ed.). (1987). Looking up: An account of the COBUILD project in lexical computing and the development of the Collins COBUILD English language dictionary. Collins Elt.

Stubbs, M. (1995). Collocations and semantic profiles: on the cause of the trouble with quantitative studies. Functions of language, 2(1), 23-55.

Stubbs, M. (2001). Words and Phrases. Oxford: Blackwell.

Tsai, Mei-chi, Huang, Chu-ren & Chen, Keh-jiann (1996). You jinyici bianyi biaozhun kan yuyi, jufa zhi hudong [From near-synonyms to the interaction between syntax and semantics]. paper presented at IsCLL-5, Taipei, Taiwan.

Xiao, R., & McEnery, T. (2006). Collocation, semantic prosody, and near synonymy:

A cross-linguistic perspective. Applied linguistics, 27(1), 103-129.

Online Resources

FrameNet. https://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu/fndrupal/home Google Taiwan. https://www.google.com.tw/

Jiaoyubu Chongbian Guoyu Cidian Xiudingben [MOE Revised Mandarin Chinese Dictionary]. 1994. http://dict.revised.moe.edu.tw/

Zhongyanyuan Pingheng Yuliaoku [Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus].

http://asbc.iis.sinica.edu.tw/

Sketch Engine (Chinese TaiwanWaC). http://www.sketchengine.co.uk/

‧