Abstract

As great importance has been given to English in China, English public speaking is becoming an important part in students’ English learning. Meanwhile, many forms of English speaking contests have been flourishing in China over two decades. However, analysis of semantic prosodies in public speaking setting is relatively complex and subjective due to the difficulties in describing the evaluative meanings and the attitudes as intended by the speaker. This paper is a contrastive study of semantic prosody of the word feel which was concordanced from two sub corpora (CES_S and CES_C) from a self-built corpus (Corpus of English Speeches(CES)), aiming to explicitly reveal how EFL learners are different from native speaker when using a word with specific semantic prosody in English public speaking setting. The results show that there is no significant difference between Chinese students (EFL learners) and U.S and UK celebrities (Native English speakers) when they use the word feel with positive semantic preference in the context of delivering a speech, but EFL learners tend to express more positive emotions towards their counterparts than they do to themselves. In addition, the EFL learners have higher frequencies in using the word feel with the negative environment than the native English speaker do. This paper thus offers additional information on choosing the right semantic collocation and provide instructional guidance for English public speaking teaching and learning in China.

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