Semantic prosody, also discourse prosody, describes the way in which certain seemingly neutral words can be perceived with positive or negative associations through frequent occurrences with particular collocations. Coined in analogy to linguistic prosody, popularised by Bill Louw.

An example given by John Sinclair is the verb set in, which has a negative prosody: e.g. rot (with negative associations) is a prime example of what is going to 'set in'. Another well-known example is the verb sense of cause, which is also used mostly in a negative context (accident, catastrophe, etc.), though one can also say that something "caused happiness".

Semantic prosody, like semantic preference, can be genre- or register-dependent. For example, erupted has a positive prosody in sports reporting but a negative prosody in hard news reporting.

Effects

If a word with a strong negative semantic prosody (e.g. onslaught) co-occurs with a positive word (e.g. hospitality) instead of an expected negative word (e.g. an onslaught of hospitality), a range of effects are possible as a result of such a collocational clash: However, the narrow definition is much more widely used in corpus linguistics.

See also

  • Coherence (linguistics)
  • Discourse analysis
  • Corpus linguistics

Notes

References

  • Bednarek, M. (2008). Semantic preference and semantic prosody re-examined. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 4(2): 119-139. https://doi.org/10.1515/CLLT.2008.006
  • Hunston, S. (2007). Semantic prosody revisited. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 12(2): 249-268.
  • 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: In Honour of John Sinclair. Philadelphia/Amsterdam: John Benjamins.pp. 157–76.
  • Partington, A. (2004) "Utterly content in each other's company": Semantic prosody and semantic preference. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 9(1): 131-156.
  • Tognini-Bonelli, E. (2001) Corpus Linguistics at Work. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
  • Whitsitt, S. (2005). A critique of the concept of semantic prosody. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 10(3): 283-305.