Semantic Prosody

A Critical Evaluation

Dominic Stewart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135196431
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Semantic Prosody is the first full-length treatment of semantic prosody, a concept akin to connotation but which connects crucially with typical lexical environment. For example, it has been claimed that the adverb 'utterly' is characterised by an unfavourable semantic prosody on account of its habitual co-occurrence with words denoting unfavourable states of affairs such as 'ridiculous', 'disgraceful' and 'miserable'. Primarily for this reason, semantic prosody has emerged almost exclusively within the field of corpus linguistics. However, the overall picture is complex, and this book offers a much-needed review of how semantic prosody has been described and approached in contributions on the subject, as well as a critical analysis of those contributions and a number of case studies. It discusses the relevance of the theory of priming in this area, and whether semantic prosody has cogency as a theoretical concept. Lastly, it points the way for future research.

Since work on semantic prosody so far has been occasional, brief, and distributed across a range of monographs, articles and conference papers, this book, which does not assume previous knowledge of the subject, will constitute a fundamental work of reference for scholars, teachers and students alike. At the same time, Semantic Prosody goes beyond the central topic of the work, with wide-reaching implications for both corpus linguistics and linguistics overall. In this sense the concept of semantic prosody is used as a springboard for investigations into issues of vital importance for corpus studies such as the structuring and presentation of text in a corpus, the varying methodologies adopted by analysts to approach and interpret corpus data, as well as broader issues such as the role of intuition, introspection and elicitation in empirical language studies.

1
Features of Semantic Prosody

Infinite riches in a little room

1.0 INTRODUCTION

In this chapter I shall provide a brief chronological review of the literature on semantic prosody, starting from some initial observations by Sinclair in 1987. I shall do this because it seems important to place contributions on the subject within a temporal context from the very outset, despite the fact that these contributions are not necessarily characterised by any systematic chronological development. On the contrary, the literature on semantic prosody is more usefully examined on a thematic basis, and subsequent chapters are in fact organised by theme rather than by chronology or by individual scholar.

This initial review is by no means intended to be exhaustive, its purpose is simply that of furnishing a preliminary outline of the most important works and scholars in the field, functioning as a backdrop to the closer and more critical analysis provided by the chapters which follow.

1.1 A CHRONOLOGICAL REVIEW

1.1.1 Sinclair (1987, 1991)

Semantic prosody is a concept which has been a focus of interest among corpus linguists over the last 15–20 years. It was originally an idea of Sinclair’s in 1987, though he did not use the term as such when he first discussed it. Interest was initially kindled by Sinclair’s observations regarding the lexicogrammatical environment of the phrasal verb SET IN, later reiterated in Sinclair 1991 (74). Using a corpus of around 7.3 million words, the author makes the following observations:

1. The clauses in which set in is chosen are in general rather short—six words or fewer in the main. The longer ones are longer because of an adjunct rather than the subject, which is in most cases a single word or an article and noun pair.

2. A number of clauses are subordinate. With the samples available, it is not possible to assign status in every case, and there are some of clear main clauses; but I think the tendency to lower status should be noted.

3. Set in is final in the clause in 22 of the 29 cases, and sentence-final in nine of them, showing a clear tendency to end structures.

(Sinclair 1991:74)

Particularly salient in the concordance of SET IN are this verb’s grammatical subjects (ibid.: 74–75):

The most striking feature of this phrasal verb is the nature of its subjects. In general, they refer to unpleasant states of affairs […] The main vocabulary is rot, decay, malaise, despair, ill-will, decadence, impoverishment, infection, prejudice, vicious (circle), rigor mortis, numbness, bitterness, mannerism, anticlimax, anarchy, disillusion, disillusionment, slump. Not one of these is conventionally desirable or attractive.

Later in the same work the author (ibid.:112) notes, within the framework of his idiom principle, that “many uses of words and phrases show a tendency to occur in a certain semantic environment. For example the word happen is associated with unpleasant things—accidents and the like”.

These observations were striking because they were new and backed up by replicable corpus data, which included conspicuous numbers of cooccurrences representing unpleasant states of affairs in the respective environments of both SET IN and HAPPEN.

1.1.2 Louw (1993)

The term ‘semantic prosody’ itself gained currency in Louw (1993), and was based upon a parallel with Firth’s discussions of prosody in phonological terms. In this respect Firth was concerned with the way sounds transcend segmental boundaries. The exact realisation of the phoneme /k/, for example, is dependent upon the sounds adjacent to it. The /k/ of kangaroo is not the same as the /k/ of keep, because during the realisation of the consonant the mouth is already making provision for the production of the next sound. Thus the /k/ of kangaroo prepares for the production of /æ/ rather than /i:/ or any other sound, by a process of “phonological colouring” (ibid.:158). In the same way, Louw claims (ibid.:170) that an expression such as SYMPTOMATIC OF prepares (the hearer/reader) for the production of what follows, in this case something undesirable (e.g., parental paralysis, management inadequacies, numerous disorders).

The realisation of phonemes is of course influenced by the sounds which precede them as well as those which follow, and therefore the semantic analogy extends not only to words that appear after the keyword, but more generally to the keyword’s close surrounds. According to Louw (ibid.:159), “the habitual collocates of the form set in are capable of colouring it, so it can no longer be seen in isolation from its semantic prosody, which is established through the semantic consistency of its subjects”.

Hence Louw’s (ibid.:157) definition of semantic prosody as a “consistent aura of meaning with which a form is imbued by its collocates”, with its implications of a transfer of meaning to a given word from its habitual co-text. His examples include UTTERLY, BENT ON and SYMPTOMATIC OF, for all of which he claims unfavourable prosodies. Louw is particularly interested in irony, and more specifically the type of irony produced by deviations from habitual co-occurrence patterns (ibid.:157):

Irony relies for its effect on a collocative clash which is perceived, albeit subliminally, by the reader. In order for a potential collocative clash to attract the ironist’s interest, there must be a sufficiently consistent background of expected collocation against which the instantiation of irony becomes possible.

Thus if SYMPTOMATIC OF is followed by a conventionally favourable expression such as their courage, the resulting prosodic conflict might be interpreted, perhaps subliminally, as ironic. However, Louw is careful to point out that this is not necessarily the case. A clash of this type may in his view be quite involuntary, with no ironic intention at all, perhaps disclosing the “speaker’s real attitude even where s/he is at pains to conceal it” (ibid.:157). The author subsequently states “the full hypothesis”, which runs as follows (ibid.:171):

Where encoders intend their remarks to be interpreted ironically, they ‘write the device’ in the form of an exception to an established semantic prosody. Conversely, where an utterance runs contrary to an established semantic prosody and it is clear that it is not intended by the encoder to be interpreted ironically, we find that ‘the device writes the encoder’.

The author concludes by discussing the potential implications of semantic prosody for stylistics and the persuasion industry.

Louw’s hypothesis concerning collocates ‘imbuing’ forms must rest on diachronic assumptions—the process of a form being imbued by its collocates presumably takes place over a reasonably lengthy period of time. Nevertheless the author makes few explicit allusions to diachronic considerations, remarking that “Prosodies are undoubtedly the product of a long period of refinement through historical change” (ibid.:164). The diachronic question is however taken up more earnestly by Bublitz (1996), as explained below.

1.1.3 Bublitz (1996)

Louw’s 1993 article put semantic prosody on the map, so to speak, and has hugely influenced subsequent investigations into the subject. One such investigation is that of Bublitz (1996), who goes along with the idea that a node may be coloured by its habitual co-occurrences, acquiring a “halo” of meaning as a result:

Words can have a specific halo or profile, which may be positive, pleasant and good, or else negative, unpleasant and bad […] Of course, with semantic prosody, what is involved is negative or positive semantic colouring of node (e.g., utterly) and collocate (e.g., meaningless). The node itself is then habitually associated with its semantic prosody, which is based on a semantically consistent set of collocates.

(Bublitz 1996:9)

The author also reiterates on a number of occasions the Firthian idea of a phenomenon which crosses segmental boundaries and “stretches over several units” (ibid.:9). Thus, Bublitz continues, “meaning resides not in a single word but in several words”. His examples of words characterised by semantic prosody include CAUSE, HAPPEN, COMMIT, SOMEWHAT and PREVAIL, but the author is keen to point out—and in this he moves on from Louw—that prosodies will vary according to the different basic meanings of any given word. Sinclair had claimed an unfavourable semantic prosody for HAPPEN, but this does not apply to certain meanings of the verb, for example what Bublitz (ibid.:17) terms its “by-chance-meaning” (e.g., ‘I happen to know his work’). Similarly, the verb COMMIT co-occurs significantly with unpleasant things when its meaning is that of perpetrate: in the corpora used by Bublitz, cooccurrences include adultery, offence, crime, atrocities, suicide, outrage, hara-kiri, murder, sin, error, acts of vandalism, misconduct, death in life, sacrilege, theft and infraction of taste. However, when COMMIT has other meanings, for example, commit someone/oneself to (something), the unpleasant prosody is not manifest—right-hand co-occurrences include productivity, modernisation, establishing man’s supremacy, a life of austerity, new plant construction.

Particularly worthy of note is that Bublitz’ explanation of semantic prosody (ibid.:11) has a more explicitly diachronic emphasis than previous accounts: “we know from lexical semantics that constantly ...

Table of contents

• Routledge Advances in Corpus Linguistics
• Contents
• Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Features of Semantic Prosody
• 2 The Evaluative and the Hidden
• 3 The Diachronic and the Synchronic
• 4 Semantic Prosody and Lexical Environment
• 5 Semantic Prosody and Corpus Data
• 6 Semantic Prosody and the Concordance
• 7 Intuition, Introspection and Corpus Data
• 8 Semantic Prosody and Lexical Priming
• 9 Conclusions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index