Semantic prosody of Slovene adverb–verb collocations: introducing the top-down approach

Abstract

This paper presents a corpus-driven Sinclairian analysis of five high-frequency Slovene verbs covering the lexical paradigm ‘to express orally’ in combination with their premodifying adverbs of manner. One of the main goals of the paper is to establish how frequent the phenomenon of semantic prosody actually is among high-frequency lexical items (here, adv-v pairs). A methodology aiming to provide an answer to this question has been proposed featuring the top-down approach (i.e., in order of decreasing frequency of occurrence). It involves setting up the widest possible parameters of searching for so-called ‘extended units of meaning’ and their semantic prosody amongst the most frequent lexical patterns in a language. A total of twenty-six adv-v pairs have been examined. Results indicate a strong correlation between the frequency of multi-word lexical items and their tendency to develop semantic prosodies: high-frequency collocations are thus more likely to have semantic prosodies compared to their lower-frequency counterparts. Overall, results also corroborate the trend of semantic prosody to be found with mainly negative meanings and to a lesser extent in neutral meanings, while no positive semantic prosody has been determined in this study.