Abstract: This paper adopts a corpus-based approach to make a contrastive study of the most frequently used word "remain" by both
English native speakers and Chinese English learners in the differences in colligation, collocation and semantic prosody. The
investigation of semantic prosody was conducted based on the colligations in the two corpora. The results of the study show that the
colligation types of "remain" are basically the same but vary in distribution. It was also suggested that the semantic preference and
semantic prosody vary from colligation to colligation in both corpora: in the native speakers corpus, the colligation of REMAIN+ADJ
tends to have a positive semantic preference, REMAIN+N and REMAIN+PREP a neutral one, while the rest of the colligations show a
negative one; in the Chinese English learners corpus, however, there turned out to be semantic prosody inappropriateness in each
colligation, which implies that Chinese learners fail to master the semantic prosody of "remain".

Key words: corpus, semantic prosody, remain, colligation