1. Research background

This article delves into the importance of semantic rhyme in corpus linguistics and reviews the research conducted by numerous scholars such as Stubbs, Tognini Bonelli, Partington, Sinclair, etc. since Louw (1993) first proposed the concept of semantic rhyme. The discussion focuses on the linguistic properties, generation mechanisms, and descriptive methods of semantic rhyme. There are two main viewpoints: one believes that semantic rhyme is a word attribute, judged by the semantic features of collocation words; Another view is that semantic rhyme is the pragmatic function of constructing larger units of meaning between words and context. Sinclair proposed the concept of compound terms, which includes five elements: nucleus, collocation, class connection, semantic tendency, and semantic rhyme. Semantic rhyme is a necessary element. But semantic rhyme has concealment and inconsistency in judgment. Li Wenzhong (2021) proposed the concept of "semantic rhyme parameters", using "± difficult" to represent the semantic rhyme of naked eye compound terms. However, this approach only solves the problem formally and still lacks persuasiveness in accurately judging semantic rhyme. The author proposes to break away from the internal analysis of semantic rhyme in compound words and observe their interaction with external contexts in a larger context, exploring new regular features. Taking naked eye and Chinese "naked eye" as examples, this approach is further validated from a bilingual comparative perspective.

2. Data analysis

Deeply analyzed the semantic rhyme features of the compound terms "naked eye" and "naked eye". Through data from the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Peking University Modern Chinese Corpus (CCL), researchers found that the semantic tendency of the compound term "naked eye", "visibility," can be expressed by multiple parts of speech and vocabulary, with the adjective "visible/invisible" being the most common. This compound term expresses two meanings: visible (83 times) and invisible (57 times), and it is suggested to introduce "± visibility" to distinguish between these two situations. In contextual extension, visible meaning often coexists with noun phrases representing small things, nouns of size and scale, and small, weak adjectives, while invisible meaning coexists with noun phrases representing small things, small, weak adjectives and their comparative levels, and nouns representing size and degree. It is interesting that 'difficult' only appears 3 times, while 'easy/easy' appears 10 times, indicating that the 'naked eye' compound term may be more inclined to express the semantic rhyme of 'easy', which is contrary to Sinclair's (2004) analysis.

3. Discussion

Researchers generally believe that semantic rhyme should be analyzed from within compound terms, but the analysis of naked eye compound terms shows that it is difficult to accurately determine semantic rhyme solely based on the internal elements of the term. Semantic rhyme is related to the attitude of language users and has a high degree of abstraction. Sinclair's analysis method has limitations in practical operation. Data analysis shows that only by analyzing the dynamic interaction between compound terms and adjacent language units can their semantic rhyme be revealed. There are differences in structure and content between English and Chinese compound terms, but they are functionally equivalent and both are used to emphasize the characteristics of things. The analysis of Chinese compound terms should be more flexible, allowing for the simultaneous description of multiple elements.

4. Conclusion

Sinclair's semantic rhyme analysis has been expanded to emphasize the importance of the interaction between compound terms and external contexts. Data analysis reveals the necessity of accurately describing semantic rhyme in this interaction, while clarifying the boundaries of compound terms and highlighting the function of semantic rhyme in communication. However, the universality of the research still requires more empirical analysis to verify.