A critical and historical investigation into semantic prosody

Abstract

While existing literature on cause frequently cites the negative meaning associated with that lexeme, i.e. the fact that cause tends to appear with a negative outcome, e.g. cause an accident, really no scholar has studied in any detail the historical development of the phenomenon. In order to address this missing line of scholarship concerning the diachronic development of, what we refer to here as, a semantic prosody, this paper presents a fine-grained historical study of the development of the negative semantic associations of cause by comparing tokens from the Early Modern English period to those from Present-day English. We are able to conclude that the semantic prosody involved with cause is an emergent diachronic phenomenon. In addition, we are also able to argue that it is at the level of construction that such a prosodic pattern operates. Following from the notion that the semantic prosody is a construction-level phenomenon, we offer an exemplar-based model to motivate certain of the diachronic and synchronic facts.

Why Do Word Blends with Near-Synonymous Composites Exist and Persist? The Case of Guesstimate, Chillax, Ginormous and Confuzzled

“…Whilst semantic prosodies were not directly captured, the lack of significant diff erences on any questions which included an aff ective component, e.g. the Q3 example in the Materials section, suggests this too is not a competent explanation as to why such words exist and persist (Smith & Nordquist, 2012;Xiao & McEnery, 2006).…”

“…Semantic prosodies, i.e. equivalence in semantic positivity, can also diff er (Smith & Nordquist, 2012), e.g. fi ckle (negative) and fl exible (positive) (Tognini-Bonelli, 2001).…”

Synthetic Intensification Devices in Old English

“…In what follows I deal with the different prefixed forms paying attention to the kind of spatial relation conveyed by the intensifying formative, as well as to certain characteristics of the derivational base: (i) type of construal in terms of boundedness (see Paradis 2001, 2008); (ii) semantic prosody (i.e., collocation with positive or negative terms, Smith & Nordquist 2012:291-292); and (iii) semantic class according to the classification of adjectives proposed by Dixon (2004). In this typological study Dixon (2004:3-4) identifies a number of semantic notions which are commonly associated with the word class adjective across languages.…”

“… 2 I understand semantic prosody in a narrow way, to refer to “a collocation pattern in which a node word typically pairs with or co-selects for lexemes whose semantics are consistently negative or positive” (Smith & Nordquist 2012:291-292). For a discussion of the different takes on the concept of semantic prosody, see Stewart (2010:6-20). …”

The challenge of teaching the translation of collocations: Extraction and comparison of collocations across languages applied to the training of translators

“…Last but not least, these findings have also shown that while in the Spanish language the terms consumidor and cliente are used in the same way, in German and English the terms Kunde and customer are preferred. This is probably related to socio-linguistic and pragmatic factors because the words with the root Konsum-/consum-have a negative semantic prosody (see, e.g., Stubbs 1995;Smith and Nordquist 2012) or connotation in both English and German, but not in the Spanish language.…”