This paper explores the collocational behaviour and semantic prosody of near synonyms from a cross-linguistic perspective. The importance of these concepts to language learning is well recognized. Yet while collocation and semantic prosody have recently attracted much interest from researchers studying the English language, there has been little work done on collocation and semantic prosody on languages other than English. Still less work has been undertaken contrasting the collocational behaviour and semantic prosody of near synonyms in different languages. In this paper, we undertake a cross-linguistic analysis of collocation, semantic prosody and near synonymy, drawing upon data from English and Chinese (pu3tong1hua4). The implications of the findings for language learning are also discussed.

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This article combines the corpus-based and contrastive approaches, seeking to provide a systematic account of passive constructions in two typologically distinct languages, namely British English and Mandarin Chinese. We will first explore, on the basis of written and spoken corpus data, a range of characteristics of passives in the two languages including various passive constructions, long vs. short passives, semantic, pragmatic and syntactic features as well as genre variations. On the basis of this exploration, passive constructions in the two languages are contrasted in a structured way. Methodologically, this study demonstrates that comparable monolingual corpora can be exploited fruitfully in contrastive linguistics.

The multidimensional analysis (MDA) approach was originally developed by Biber to compare written and spoken registers in English, but it has since been applied extensively in synchronic and diachronic analysis of registers in English as well as non-Western languages. While the WordSmith-style keyword analysis represents a quick and simple means of evaluating a genre against the MDA dimensions, the keyword approach nevertheless provides a less comprehensive contrast of genres and may not work for more fine-grained types of genre analysis. However, Biber's MDA model has so far been confined largely to grammatical categories, though Biber and others have started to incorporate semantic categories of some word classes in the model. In this paper, we will seek to enhance the MDA framework with semantic components and also introduce this enhanced MDA model, for the first time, in the research of world Englishes by exploring variation across twelve registers and five varieties of English in the International Corpus of English (ICE), which are annotated with grammatical and semantic categories.