Unravelling the complexity of semantic prosody: A theoretical inquiry

Abstract

Placed at the intersection of semantics and pragmatics, the concept of semantic prosody has been associated with various notions including evaluative meaning, attitudinal meaning and connotations, and there is no agreement among researchers as to its definition and operationalization. In this critical-reflection theoretical paper, we provide an overview of collocational and discoursal approaches to semantic prosody, which we treat as distinct and, at the same time, complementary. Furthermore, we suggest that the semantic prosody can be conceptualised as an interaction between a source and a target term, where the target term has a descriptive semantic content, and it receives its evaluative meaning from the source term, which can be either only evaluative (thin) or both evaluative and descriptive (thick). Next, we propose that the source of semantic prosody can be accounted for in terms of value judgments. In particular, a value judgment that a speaker ascribes to the factual content of a term is always relative to a certain kind of standard. Thus, our proposal supports the view that the speaker's stance, manifested in value judgments that they ascribe to terms, can be considered as a source of semantic prosody.