Semantic Prosody in Bilingual Dictionaries and EFL Learners’ Sentence Writings

Abstract

The purpose of the current study was bi-fold. First it was to examine how the semantic prosody of eight lexical items that had a specific semantic prosody were presented and explained in the six English-Korean bilingual dictionaries. In addition, it was to investigate how those lexical items were used in university students’ sentence writings in relation to semantic prosody. The result showed that the semantic prosodies of the lexical items were not adequately presented in the dictionaries in general and a number of inappropriate uses of lexical items in relation to semantic prosody were identified in the students’ sentence writings. It was suggested that EFL dictionary publishers should explicitly address the issue of semantic prosody by providing information about the semantic preference and collocational behavior of a lexical item and they should be more cautious when presenting Korean translations/equivalents in the dictionaries. Along the same lines, it was also suggested that EFL/ESL teachers should (a) recognize the value of semantic prosody in L2 communication; (b) avoid the vocabulary teaching practice of explaining the meaning of words by simply providing near synonyms; and (c) make the students more aware of the difference in semantic prosody between English lexical items and their Korean translations/equivalents.