Article published In:
Words, grammar, text: revisiting the work of John SinclairEdited by Rosamund Moon
[International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 12:2] 2007
► pp. 249–268
Edited by Rosamund Moon
[International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 12:2] 2007
► pp. 249–268
Semantic prosody revisited
This paper considers the contentious term ‘semantic prosody’ and discusses a number of aspects of the concept described by the term. It is
pointed out that although many writers use it to refer to the implied attitudinal meaning of a word, Sinclair uses the term to refer to the
discourse function of a unit of meaning. Problems of apparent counter-examples, when a word or unit does not have the semantic prosody that
is typical of it, are discussed. The second point made is that the phenomena described as ‘semantic prosody’ can be regarded as
observational data, but that they are often used to explain subjective reactions to a given text or to predict such reactions. The issues
raised by these different uses are discussed. Finally, the pitfalls of using concordance lines to observe attitudinal language in highly
opinionated texts are discussed.
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