Abstract
This paper reports on a contrastive study of semantic prosody in English and Norwegian. Semantic prosody refers to the communicative function of extended units of meaning (Sinclair 1996, Stubbs 2013), i.e. «the semantic prosody of an item is the reason why it is chosen, over and above the semantic preferences that also characterise it» (Sinclair 1998: 20), where an item is equated with the sequence of words constituting an extended unit of meaning.
 
 The paper presents three case studies of English units with an established negative prosody containing the core items ‘commit’, ‘signs of’ and ‘utterly’. The Norwegian correspondences of these items are identified on the basis of a bidirectional corpus, viz. the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus. These correspondences serve as the starting point for an investigation of cross-linguistic prosodies. It is shown that while units with ‘commit’ and ‘signs of’ have good Norwegian matches in terms of semantic prosody, units with ‘utterly’ are less stable across the two languages, underlining the importance of carrying out studies of this kind in order to improve the cross-linguistic understanding of extended units of meaning. This in turn has implications for how teachers, translators and lexicographers choose to present words in isolation or as part of larger, extended units.
Highlights
The paper presents three case studies of English units with an established negative prosody containing the core items commit, signs of and utterly
In a previous cross-linguistic study of an English unit with an established negative prosody – a unit including cause – and its Norwegian correspondences, it was revealed that the favoured Norwegian translation of the verb cause: få (x til å) shows a tendency towards a neutral prosody, rather than a negative prosody corresponding to that of cause (Ebeling 2013)
In this paper I will use the extended fiction part of the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus (ENPC+, )1 to further explore semantic prosodies in a contrastive perspective, taking three English items as my starting point, which all have been said to take on negative prosodies: commit, signs of, and utterly
Summary
This paper reports on a contrastive study of semantic prosody in English and Norwegian. Glish and Norwegian (Ebeling 2013), using a parallel corpus, including both translational and comparable data (see Section [3] for a description of the corpus) Taking another English core of an extended unit of meaning with an established negative semantic prosody as its starting point (see Stubbs 1995; Ebeling 2013) explored the noun and verb uses of cause in a contrastive perspective. Berber Sardinha’s (2000, 98) cross-linguistic study of commit and its Portuguese counterpart cometer, based on comparable data, suggests similar prosodies for the units across the two languages This tendency is confirmed in the bidirectional translation data drawn from the ENPC+ where monotransitive commit with the meaning of “carry out” is exclusively found in the vicinity of negatively loaded events such as murder, crime, suicide, as illustrated in the concordance lines from the ENPC+ in figure 2 on the following page. (excluding reflexive commit oneself (to) and commit (to) ‘pledge’ or ‘bind’). Norwegian translation begå ‘commit’ utføre ‘carry out’ / ‘perform’ ta ‘take’ Ø other Total
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