Differences in Word Collocations of “Jǐnzhāng” in Cross-Strait Chinese

Based on the “Sinica Corpus” in Taiwan and the “BCC Corpus of Beijing Language and Culture University” in Mainland, this study explores the semantic prosody differences between the word “jǐnzhāng” in cross-strait Chinese and uses the method of Colligation to combine the retrieved corpus. After sorting and classifying, the researcher wants to explore the distribution of collocations and semantic prosody of “jǐnzhāng” in cross-strait Chinese, then analyze the different semantic prosody of the word “jǐnzhāng” under other collocations. Furthermore, the word “jǐnzhāng” shows their characteristics and reflects the differences between cross-straits. The results of the study found that although the collocation habits of the word “tension” in the cross-strait regions are somewhat similar, there are still some differences. The collocation words preferred and concentrated in Taiwan are primarily “Emotion” and “Situation”, and the meaning items are concentrated in the usage of “Anxiety”; In Mainland, the preferred collocations are “Situation” and “Resource”, but the usage of collocations is more scattered than in Taiwan, and the usage of collocations is mostly “Urgent” in terms of meaning. The specific usage is “Resource”, which is collocated with the meaning of insufficient supply. The words that are often used in this usage are things that people can obtain, limited resources, or things that people can control. Only collocations with these common points can be matched with “tension” resulting in insufficient supply. In terms of semantic prosody, most of the usages are neutral semantic prosody, except for the use of “form situation”, which is negative semantic prosody. In the “Situation + Urgency” usage, the collocation and semantic prosody between cross-strait Chinese are consistent. On the whole, through semantic prosody analysis of the word “jǐnzhāng”, it is verified that there are actual “similarities but differences” in the development of vocabulary in cross-strait Chinese.