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.
2024. Semantic prosody, semantic transfer and semantic change. ICAME Journal 48:1 ► pp. 67 ff.
陶, 雯馨
2023. A Corpus-Based Contrastive Study on the Semantic Prosody between English and Chinese Synonyms—Taking “cause”, “arouse” and “导致”, “促使” as Examples. Modern Linguistics 11:08 ► pp. 3500 ff.
Grabowski, Łukasz
2022. Provoke or encourage improvements? On semantic prosody in English-to-Polish translation. Perspectives 30:1 ► pp. 120 ff.
Méndez-Naya, Belén
2021. Synthetic Intensification Devices in Old English. Journal of English Linguistics 49:2 ► pp. 208 ff.
Ruiz Yepes, Guadalupe
2021. The challenge of teaching the translation of collocations: Extraction and comparison of collocations across languages applied to the training of translators. redit - Revista Electrónica de Didáctica de la Traducción y la Interpretación 1:14 ► pp. 3 ff.
Zhang, Hong
2021. “What do you know about semantic prosody?” Teaching and evaluating implicit knowledge of English with corpus-assisted methods. English in Education 55:4 ► pp. 337 ff.
2017. Pragmatic meaning in contrast: semantic prosodies of Slovene and English. Perspectives 25:1 ► pp. 157 ff.
Kucharski, Adam & Celina Timoszyk-Tomczak
2015. Appreciation of Ambiguous Humorous Messages: The Influence of Processing Mode and Presentation. Psychology of Language and Communication 19:1 ► pp. 29 ff.
Rhys Evans, Thomas & Gail Steptoe-Warren
2015. Why Do Word Blends with Near-Synonymous Composites Exist and Persist? The Case of Guesstimate, Chillax, Ginormous and Confuzzled. Psychology of Language and Communication 19:1 ► pp. 19 ff.
Blanco-Suárez, Zeltia
2014. Oh he is olde dogge at expoundingdeadesure at a Catechisme: Some considerations on the history of the intensifying adverbdeadin English. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 46:1 ► pp. 117 ff.
Blanco-Suárez, Zeltia
2020. Mortal hurryandmortal fine: on the rise of intensifyingmortal. Studia Neophilologica 92:3 ► pp. 271 ff.
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