Is corpus stylistics bent on self-improvement? The role of reference corpora 20 years after the advent of semantic prosody

Abstract

Abstract This paper (based on a presentation delivered at the 2012 PALA conference in Malta) aims to explain and illustrate the main principles of Contextual Prosodic Theory (CPT), developed by Bill Louw, the originator of the notion of semantic prosody (McEnery and Hardy, 2012: 135). No less importantly, it aims to free the theory from unwarranted criticism it has attracted over the past few years. I deal with the theoretical objections to Louw's stylistics in McEnery and Hardy (2012) and in Hunston (2007). In doing so, certain basic assumptions of Louw's stylistics are restated, such as the roles of intuition, authorial intention and the individual reader's perception. Is Louw justified in assuming that a text may be interpreted by what is, prima facie, NOT in it? After showing how reference corpora can reasonably be taken to influence the act of reading, I give an illustration of a new development in CPT: logical semantic prosody – subtext (Louw 2010a, 2010b). The reference corpora I use include the BNC and COCA, available on Mark Davies' site, and Tim Johns' corpus of the 1995 edition of the Times newspaper, containing 44.5 million words.