Tell me what your collocates are, and I will tell you who you are

Abstract

Collocates are words that tend to co-occur together such as peanut butter and jelly. Collocational pairs can also consist of a word plus a set of words that share similar semantic properties. For example, the verb cause, which means to make something happen, often co-occurs with negative words such as damage or harm. However, the phrasal verb bring about, which also means to make something happen, tends to co-occur with positive words such as change and justice. In other words, cause has a negative semantic prosody whereas bring about has a positive semantic prosody. Such semantic nuances can be challenging for English learners to acquire or even notice, making explicit instruction on semantic prosody a worthwhile endeavor. This chapter introduces a lesson plan that can help raise English learners’ awareness toward semantic prosody. The lesson plan incorporates data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English, showing how semantic prosodies can be identified and empirically quantified through corpus-based analyses.