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Article published In:
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
Vol. 23:4 (2018) ► pp.437–466

Solving contradictions in semantic prosody analysis with prosody concord

| Huazhong University of Science and Technology
| Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Using collocation-based approaches, semantic prosody analyses of lemmas like alleviate and cure yield judgments of negative prosody, which contradict common sense. This poses a challenge to the concept of semantic prosody and the principle of co-occurrence. To solve such contradictions, this paper proposes a new approach to semantic prosody analysis named ‘prosody concord’. The approach adopts collostruction as the locus of analysis on the basis of the explication of the unit of meaning model, and uses a mechanism for semantic prosody determination that incorporates multiple sources of information such as interactions of words, collocations, colligations and semantic preferences. Case studies of the lemmas budge, credibility, cause and alleviate show that the proposed approach can solve the contradictions and provide a consistent means for semantic prosody analysis.

Keywords: semantic prosody, prosody concord, unit of meaning, collostruction
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Semantic prosody and semantic prosody analysis
    • 2.1Defining semantic prosody
    • 2.2Semantic prosody analysis
      • 2.2.1Collocation-based semantic prosody analysis
      • 2.2.2Discourse-based semantic prosody analysis
  • 3.Prosody concord
    • 3.1Collostruction as locus of semantic prosody
    • 3.2Mechanism for determining semantic prosody
  • 4.Case studies
    • 4.1 budge
    • 4.2 credibility
    • 4.3 cause
    • 4.4 alleviate
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 27 December 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.17057.liu
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