No abstract

Semantic prosody is perhaps the most elusive meaning component established to date, and the present paper is a corpus-driven attempt to elucidate the meaning-forming process in some of the most frequent lexical items in Slovene and English. The underlying methodology is based on the novel top-down approach, which provides a semantically unmotivated point of view and is based on raw data, i.e., frequency of occurrence. The paper features a comparison of the pervasiveness of evident semantic prosody in high-frequency lexical items in Slovene and English, respectively. In closing it also deals with the problems involved in L1-L2 translation of the observed extended units of meaning, where possible translation equivalents exhibit varying levels of (mis)match in their semantic prosodies.

The opening part of the article discusses reasons for the lukewarm reception of language corpora in the language teaching community. The first reason is the complex syntax and rudimentary user interface of early corpora accessible in the 1990s. The second reason why corpora have witnessed a relatively slow start in language teaching is the fear of the unknown and of an unruly linguistic reality that is often at odds with rules taught at school. The practical part of the article presents a survey conducted among Slovene university students of translation. The survey focused on the effect of using a target language corpus in the course of Slovene into English translation in terms of English collocation. It found that the number of collocation errors in translation can be greatly reduced by competent use of a L2 corpus, which yields a translation with a higher level of idiomaticity.

This paper presents a corpus-driven Sinclairian analysis of five high-frequency Slovene verbs covering the lexical paradigm ‘to express orally’ in combination with their premodifying adverbs of manner. One of the main goals of the paper is to establish how frequent the phenomenon of semantic prosody actually is among high-frequency lexical items (here, adv-v pairs). A methodology aiming to provide an answer to this question has been proposed featuring the top-down approach (i.e., in order of decreasing frequency of occurrence). It involves setting up the widest possible parameters of searching for so-called ‘extended units of meaning’ and their semantic prosody amongst the most frequent lexical patterns in a language. A total of twenty-six adv-v pairs have been examined. Results indicate a strong correlation between the frequency of multi-word lexical items and their tendency to develop semantic prosodies: high-frequency collocations are thus more likely to have semantic prosodies compared to their lower-frequency counterparts. Overall, results also corroborate the trend of semantic prosody to be found with mainly negative meanings and to a lesser extent in neutral meanings, while no positive semantic prosody has been determined in this study.

Evaluative meaning is frequently understood as a form of connotation, pertaining to single lexical items. However, the term has recently been applied also to longer stretches of text, spanning several words. The paper generally deals with the latter aspect and provides a corpus-driven analysis of several Slovene and English phrases that may appear semantically neutral, yet turn out to be heavily non-neutral in terms of their semantic properties. After a short introduction of the main approaches to the topic, including its dilemmas, the paper focuses on the L1-into-L2 translation of such strings, with particular emphasis on proper rendering of the evaluative meaning. While further research is warranted into the matter, the work presented here attests to the complex and ubiquitous nature of the Sinclairian extended unit of meaning.