Cross-linguistic and language-specific aspects of semantic prosody

Abstract

The hypothesis defended in the paper refers to the existence of a certain aura of meaning connected with individual lexical items which spreads over the senses of their neighbours by creating specific semantic expectations. This phenomenon is referred to as semantic harmony or semantic prosody (cf. Sinclair, 1994), which, in analogy to phonology, is understood as a fairly systematic spread of a feature from a ‘trigger’ to other linguistic units which I call ‘targets’. If the semantic expectations are overridden by the occurrence of items different to those expected, the result may be figures of speech such as irony or paradox (e.g. Louw, 1993). Instances of the triggers with some forms of explicit or implicit negation in their conceptual/semantic structure are discussed and an attempt is made to show to what extent the items in the same utterance or in a larger unit of speech (say, speech event or a paragraph) harmonise with the negative nature of their triggers. It is suggested that the semantic prosodies of some triggers exihibit a universal character, while some others remain language-specific. The analysis is illustrated with examples from English and Polish.