A Corpus-Based Study on Semantic Prosody of English Synonyms "Common" and "Ordinary"

Semantic prosody is an important language phenomenon discovered and developed by corpus linguists. The distinction of synonyms is the focus and difficulty in language teaching and learning. This thesis tries to explore the semantic prosody of one pair of synonyms: the adjective pair "common" and "ordinary"; and it is suggested that in English vocabulary teaching, teachers should emphasize the knowledge of semantic prosody, and introduce corpus retrieve appropriately to it in order to help learners acquire the word knowledge about what words and what semantic associations it constantly co-occurs.