Abstract: Semantic prosody is the semantic atmosphere shared by the node word and its collocates. With the FICTION part from COCA and the LITERATURE part from BCC as data, this research aims to compare the semantic prosody of the synonyms of ANNOUNCE, DECLARE and Xuanbu in terms of their frequencies, significant collocates.It is found that: There are significant differences between ANNOUNCE, DECLARE and Xuanbu in their frequencies of usage; DECLARE and Xuanbu share more consistency in semantic features of significant collocates, mostly used in formal occasions, while ANNOUNCE is habitually used in informal occasions; The semantic prosody of DECLARE and Xuanbu tends to be neutral, while the semantic prosody of ANNOUNCE tends to be neutral and positive.

Key words: semantic prosody, significant collocates, corpus, English-Chinese contrast, synonyms