Title: A Corpus-based Study on the Extended Unit of Meaning of the Verb “Keep” in COCA

Abstract: In the boom of second language acquisition, language learning not only focuses on morphology and syntax, but also on the context of the language and its overall meaning. Therefore, with the help of COCA, this study takes the verb “keep” as the node word to analyze the extended unit of meaning, and the features of collocation, colligation, semantic preference and semantic prosody in the context. The study finds that “keep” can be connected with adjectives, adverbs, nouns, and prepositions, thus forming a very rich syntactic structure. In addition, when the word is matched with the adjective, the collocation reflects the positive semantic tendency, and the context reflects the positive semantic prosody of “keep.” In addition, its collocation words still have a neutral and negative semantic preference. Meanwhile, it is found that the word “keep” can also reflect neutral and derogatory semantic prosody. It is suggested that English learners should conduct investigation based on the extended units of meaning when expanding vocabulary.

Keywords: extended unit of meaning, corpus, keep, semantic prosody

Authors: Yaying Luo, Department of Foreign Language, Zhejiang Gongshang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China; Chan Chen, Associate Professor, Department of Foreign Language, Zhejiang Gongshang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China.