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'. [1] Another well-known example is the verb sense of cause, which is also used mostly in a negative context (accident, catastrophe, etc.), [2] though one can also say that something "caused happiness". [3]
Semantic prosody, like semantic preference, can be genre- or register-dependent. [4] [5] For example, erupted has a positive prosody in sports reporting but a negative prosody in hard news reporting. [4]
In recent years, linguists have used corpus linguistics and concordancing software to find such hidden associations. Specialised 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 account 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 combined with that of lexicography.
Semantic prosodies can be examined cross-linguistically, by contrasting the semantic prosody of near synonyms in different languages such as English and Chinese. [6]
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: [5]
There are debates about whether the regular co-occurrence of a particular word with positive/negative words results in that word acquiring a positive or negative connotation. Clear counter-examples include words with positive connotations that regularly co-occur with negative words, for example ease, soothe, tackle. [5] In such cases, the words that follow such verbs are probably perceived as negative, but not the verbs themselves.
Another debate concerns whether the term semantic/discourse prosody only relates to positive/negative meaning (narrow definition) or to more complex attitudinal/functional meaning. [5] According to John Sinclair, semantic prosody "expresses something close to the ‘function’ of the item – it shows how the rest of the item is to be interpreted functionally”. [7] However, the narrow definition is much more widely used in corpus linguistics.
Corpus linguistics is the study of a language as that language is expressed in its text corpus, its body of "real world" text. Corpus linguistics proposes that a reliable analysis of a language is more feasible with corpora collected in the field—the natural context ("realia") of that language—with minimal experimental interference. The large collections of text allow linguistics to run quantitative analyses on linguistic concepts, otherwise harder to quantify.
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Someone who engages in this study is called a linguist. See also the Outline of linguistics, the List of phonetics topics, the List of linguists, and the List of cognitive science topics. Articles related to linguistics include:
In corpus linguistics, a collocation is a series of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. In phraseology, a collocation is a type of compositional phraseme, meaning that it can be understood from the words that make it up. This contrasts with an idiom, where the meaning of the whole cannot be inferred from its parts, and may be completely unrelated.
In linguistics, anaphora is the use of an expression whose interpretation depends upon another expression in context. In a narrower sense, anaphora is the use of an expression that depends specifically upon an antecedent expression and thus is contrasted with cataphora, which is the use of an expression that depends upon a postcedent expression. The anaphoric (referring) term is called an anaphor. For example, in the sentence Sally arrived, but nobody saw her, the pronoun her is an anaphor, referring back to the antecedent Sally. In the sentence Before her arrival, nobody saw Sally, the pronoun her refers forward to the postcedent Sally, so her is now a cataphor. Usually, an anaphoric expression is a pro-form or some other kind of deictic expression. Both anaphora and cataphora are species of endophora, referring to something mentioned elsewhere in a dialog or text.
In linguistics, prosody is the study of elements of speech that are not individual phonetic segments but which are properties of syllables and larger units of speech, including linguistic functions such as intonation, stress, and rhythm. Such elements are known as suprasegmentals.
A word is a basic element of language that carries meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of what a word is, there is no consensus among linguists on its definition and numerous attempts to find specific criteria of the concept remain controversial. Different standards have been proposed, depending on the theoretical background and descriptive context; these do not converge on a single definition. Some specific definitions of the term "word" are employed to convey its different meanings at different levels of description, for example based on phonological, grammatical or orthographic basis. Others suggest that the concept is simply a convention used in everyday situations.
A concordance is an alphabetical list of the principal words used in a book or body of work, listing every instance of each word with its immediate context. Historically, concordances have been compiled only for works of special importance, such as the Vedas, Bible, Qur'an or the works of Shakespeare, James Joyce or classical Latin and Greek authors, because of the time, difficulty, and expense involved in creating a concordance in the pre-computer era.
In linguistics, the term lexis designates the complete set of all possible words in a language, or a particular subset of words that are grouped by some specific linguistic criteria. For example, the general term English lexis refers to all words of the English language, while more specific term English religious lexis refers to a particular subset within English lexis, encompassing only words that are semantically related to the religious sphere of life.
John McHardy Sinclair was a Professor of Modern English Language at Birmingham University from 1965 to 2000. He pioneered work in corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, lexicography, and language teaching.
In lexicography, a lexical item is a single word, a part of a word, or a chain of words (catena) that forms the basic elements of a language's lexicon (≈ vocabulary). Examples are cat, traffic light, take care of, by the way, and it's raining cats and dogs. Lexical items can be generally understood to convey a single meaning, much as a lexeme, but are not limited to single words. Lexical items are like semes in that they are "natural units" translating between languages, or in learning a new language. In this last sense, it is sometimes said that language consists of grammaticalized lexis, and not lexicalized grammar. The entire store of lexical items in a language is called its lexis.
Bootstrapping is a term used in language acquisition in the field of linguistics. It refers to the idea that humans are born innately equipped with a mental faculty that forms the basis of language. It is this language faculty that allows children to effortlessly acquire language. As a process, bootstrapping can be divided into different domains, according to whether it involves semantic bootstrapping, syntactic bootstrapping, prosodic bootstrapping, or pragmatic bootstrapping.
The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) is a one-billion-word corpus of contemporary American English. It was created by Mark Davies, retired professor of corpus linguistics at Brigham Young University (BYU).
Corpus-assisted discourse studies is related historically and methodologically to the discipline of corpus linguistics. The principal endeavor of corpus-assisted discourse studies is the investigation, and comparison of features of particular discourse types, integrating into the analysis the techniques and tools developed within corpus linguistics. These include the compilation of specialised corpora and analyses of word and word-cluster frequency lists, comparative keyword lists and, above all, concordances.
In computational linguistics the Yarowsky algorithm is an unsupervised learning algorithm for word sense disambiguation that uses the "one sense per collocation" and the "one sense per discourse" properties of human languages for word sense disambiguation. From observation, words tend to exhibit only one sense in most given discourse and in a given collocation.
The Quranic Arabic Corpus is an annotated linguistic resource consisting of 77,430 words of Quranic Arabic. The project aims to provide morphological and syntactic annotations for researchers wanting to study the language of the Quran.
Michael Hoey was a British linguist and Baines Professor of English Language. He lectured in applied linguistics in over 40 countries.
Sketch Engine is a corpus manager and text analysis software developed by Lexical Computing CZ s.r.o. since 2003. Its purpose is to enable people studying language behaviour to search large text collections according to complex and linguistically motivated queries. Sketch Engine gained its name after one of the key features, word sketches: one-page, automatic, corpus-derived summaries of a word's grammatical and collocational behaviour. Currently, it supports and provides corpora in 90+ languages.
CLOC was a first generation general purpose text analyzer program. It was produced at the University of Birmingham and could produce concordances as well as word lists and collocational analysis of text. First-generation concordancers were typically held on a mainframe computer and used at a single site; individual research teams would build their own concordancer and use it on the data they had access to locally, any further analysis was done by separate programs.
CorCenCC or the National Corpus of Contemporary Welsh is a language resource for Welsh speakers, Welsh learners, Welsh language researchers, and anyone who is interested in the Welsh language. CorCenCC is a freely accessible collection of multiple language samples, gathered from real-life communication, and presented in the searchable online CorCenCC text corpus. The corpus is accompanied by an online teaching and learning toolkit – Y Tiwtiadur – which draws directly on the data from the corpus to provide resources for Welsh language learning at all ages and levels.
Horror aequi, or avoidance of identity, is a linguistic principle that language users have psychological or physiological motives or limits on cognitive planning to avoid repetition of identical linguistic structures.
