Semantic prosody

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Semantic prosody, also discourse prosody, describes the way in which certain seemingly neutral words can come to carry positive or negative associations through frequently occurring with particular collocations.

An example given by John Sinclair is combination set in, which has a negative prosody: rot is a prime example for what is going to set in.^[1] Other well-known examples are cause, which is also mostly used in a negative context (accident, catastrophe, etc.), though one can also say that something "caused happiness".

In recent years, linguists have found many hidden associations affecting the neutrality of language, through the use of corpus linguistics and concordancing software. The software is used to arrange Key Words in Context from a corpus of several million words of naturally-occurring text. The collocates can then be arranged alphabetically according to first or second word to the right or to the left. Using such a method, Elena Tognini-Bonelli (2001) found that the word largely occurred more frequently with negative words or expressions, while broadly appeared more frequently with positive ones. Lexicographers have often failed to allow for semantic prosody when defining a word, although with the recent development and increasing use of computers, the field of corpus linguistics is now being incorporated into that of lexicography.

[edit] References

Louw, Bill (1993) Irony in the Text or Insincerity in the Writer? The Diagnostic Potential of Semantic Prosodies. In Baker, M., Francis, G. & Tognini-Bonelli, E. (eds) "Text and Technology". Philadelphia/Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Tognini-Bonelli, E. (2001) Corpus Linguistics at Work. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.