Semantic Prosody Research Articles

In and out of Possession: How Football Terms Can Illustrate the Connection Between Polysemy and the Register-Sensitivity of Semantic Prosody

ABSTRACT This article explores semantic prosody’s sensitivity to register. In previous research, the prosodies of units of meaning have been shown to vary across registers (Xiao and McEnery 2006; Hunston 2007; Ebeling 2021a), but this has generally not been viewed in connection with polysemy. This paper investigates this connection through a corpus study of the units in which the items possession, the edge of and penalty function as cores, inside and outside of a football context. The study compares material from the ENMaRC with data from the registers newspaper and fiction in the BNC2014, addressing the research question: to what extent is polysemy a contributing factor to the register-sensitivity of semantic prosody? Further, the study introduces a novel way of visualising collocation, inspired by atomic structures. The findings suggest that the register-specificity of prosody can be connected to the items’ separate senses, the semantic fields in which they are prevalent, and how these fields are distributed unequally across registers.

Who Is Mrs. McNab? A Cognitive Stylistic Approach to This Narrative Agent and Narrative Device in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse

In this article, I investigate the ontological status of the minor working-class character Mrs. McNab, the cleaner in “Time Passes", the middle section of Virginia Woolf’s tripartite novel To the Lighthouse. Woolf regarded this section as the connecting block between the two outer blocks, “The Window” and “The Lighthouse”, in which she aimed to depict an empty house, devoid of human presence, and to highlight the passage of time. This section has often been analysed by literary-stylistic criticism as if written from a non-anthropocentric worldview. However, the presence of a lower-class cleaner and the absence of the upper middle-class characters who predominate in the other two blocks has also raised much debate in the literary arena. Literary critics agree that this character is given a narrative voice, but how this voice functions, and whether this character is granted narrative agency in terms of the class issues and social relations in the period of transition between Victorian England and the early twentieth-century, is an issue which still remains open. Drawing upon cognitive stylistics, I suggest reading this character both as a category-based and person-based character, and as a narrative device. First, I carry out the analysis of the repetitive she-clusters and their semantic prosodies; then, through samples of the section “Time Passes", I analyse how viewpoint blending between narrator/author and character concur to grant narrative agency to Mrs. McNab and to what extent such agency may be limited by our perception of her through the social schemata of a servant, or whether such a perception may undergo a process of schema refreshment. Last, I suggest that this character may also be viewed as a narrative agent by means of which the reader can activate mental processes of TIME and SPACE blending between the three different blocks of the novel. This blending process allows for the completion of the narrative design of the novel: the journey to the lighthouse.

No ifs ands or buts… Semantic Prosody Eliminates In-School Suspensions in Middle School: A Case Study in Behavioral Conduct

This study describes a before school program (90 minutes) in the US. It focuses on two brothers who had challenges with social and emotional engagement that included episodes of fighting, running away, extreme profanity, resentment, egocentric selfishness, bullying, and aggressive competition. The program was led by 7 para-leads (mean age 24.1) who had no training in teacher education. The children disliked (did not trust) school and arrived daily armed with retroactive inhibitions aimed at adult caregivers, school equipment, and personnel. In the current study, we test the hypothesis that a cognitive neuroscience approach to engagement inspired by para-leads who share a nuanced mental model about how school functions and how children learn, would exert an appreciable change to the brothers’ behavioral upsurges. The study was an opportunistic quasi-experimental design that served a population in daily need, with a solution that involved caring for children. This study was grounded in neuroscience teacher education literature involving mental models that illuminate classroom management techniques. Findings highlight that para-lead acquired mental models launched long-lasting change to the brothers’ singular and shared behavioral patterns. Future studies are suggested to clarify affect and effect about semantic prosody and learning systems.

Polarisation: the new 'superword'. Meanings and current uses in English and Spanish

A growing concern in most European countries, polarisation has spread far beyond the political arena and is now present in public opinion in a wide variety of social and cultural subjects, from economics to education, health, environment or religion. Rather than an enriching plurality of views, polarisation is mostly perceived as a negative trend that hinders consensus and favours conflict instead, threatening welfare, peace and even democracy. As a result, the word polarisation has become a frequent term in the press. This paper examines the way in which the word polarisation is used in a corpus of news items collected from four widely read mainstream newspapers, two Spanish and two British, all of them containing the word polarización/polarisation and published in 2022. A combination of Corpus Linguistics methods and a Critical Socio-Cognitive approach to Discourse Analysis has been followed in order to analyse the most common contexts and patterns of usage of the term in the press in these two countries, its negative semantic prosody and collocational behaviour, as well as the underlying schematic conceptualization of the phenomenon as realized in metaphors and image schemas. Even though minor differences have been found, results show significant similarities in Spanish and English, which manifest the negative evaluation associated to the term construed by its collocates, by metaphorical source domains such as disease, war or dangerous natural forces, as well as by image schemas that impinge on physical and ideological distance. Conclusions suggest that polarisation has become a sociopolitical keyword, a ‘superword’ with enhanced meanings and strong framing effects in the texts in which it occurs.

Study on the Translation of the Report of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China from the Perspective of Semantic Prosody

Semantic prosody has become a research hotspot among domestic scholars. The repeated use of words forms habitual collocations, which in turn endows words with a consistent tone, thus creating semantic prosody. This paper compares and analyzes some vocabulary in the original text and the translation of the Report of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, using a corpus to determine their semantic tendencies and the corresponding relationships of semantic prosody. The study explores the impact of semantic prosody on translation.

REPRESENTATION OF THE WORD 'REMAJA' IN ONLINE MEDIA: CORPUS-ASSISTED DISCOURSE STUDY

Reporting about adolescents in the mass media has a tendency towards criminal acts and delinquent behavior. The aim of this research is to look at the representation of the word 'remaja' in the online media Detikcom from 2022 to 2024 based on a corpus-assisted discourse study. This research uses a mixed approach, with the data source in the form of a corpus composed of Detikcom news articles related to adolescent issues. The corpus has a total number of 325,313 tokens and 26,652 types of words. Through collocation analysis, 45 noun, adjectival, and verbal collocates were taken (15 collocates per word class), which significantly collocated with the word remaja. There are words that explicitly show negative meanings, such as kenakalan, tawuran, gerombolan, mesum, ugal-ugalan, brutal, sadis, mabuk, and tewas. Apart from that, there are also two words that show positive meanings, such as romantis and mengatasi. From the semantic prosody analysis, it can be seen that the word remaja tends to collocate with words that have negative prosody. Based on the concordance lines that have been studied, it was found that there were many crime news that featured adolescents either as perpetrators or as victims of crime. The most frequently found semantic prosody category was negative absolute with 26 collocates, followed by the flexible extremely negative category with 13 collocates. Meanwhile, both the absolute positive and the flexible extremely positive category only have 3 collocates. It can be said that society's view of adolescents is not much different from online media, which is dominated by negative news about adolescents. This ultimately shapes adolescent discourse, which can influence how adolescents are seen and treated in society.

Corpus-driven Analysis on Chinese Image in APEC -- Speeches at Economic Leaders’ Meetings

This paper conducts an analysis of Chinese image construction. Under the circumstance of Corpus controlled, two research questions are proposed. For the first question of linguistic features, the paper utilizes the keywords and the diachronic N-grams analyses respectively to find that three groups of Lemmas and four key diachronic headwords. For the last question, according to semantic prosody of Concordance analysis, the images are constructed by the economic vigorousness, the environmental friendliness, and an abided role in APEC rules.

A Corpus Linguistics Analysis of Food Metaphors “Eat Up” and “Consume” through the Lenses of Conceptual Metaphor and Lexical Priming Theories

Research has shown that food metaphors play an important role in humans' conceptualization of various domains of experience. However, insufficient attention has been paid to the phraseology of food metaphors. This research aims to investigate food metaphors and their phraseology. Particularly, this paper focuses on the lemmas “consume” and “eat up.” These words were searched for in the Corpus of Contemporary American English. One hundred instances of each grammatical form of “consume” and “eat up” were analyzed, using Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980) and Lexical Priming tTheory (Hoey, 2005). The results indicate that 16 target domains are conceptualized using both words, with some target domains being exclusive to each word. Analyses of collocations, semantic preferences, and semantic prosody reveal that these two words have different connotations. This research casts light on food metaphors, how they are used for conceptualization, and the collocations that distinguish metaphorical and non-metaphorical uses, as well as the meanings of “eat up” and “consume.”

A CORPUS-BASED STUDY OF JOKO WIDODO’S REPRESENTATION IN THAI MEDIAS

The present research examines how Joko Widodo is represented in Thai media by analyzing the semantic prosody linked to his name and exploring the linguistic framing employed by the Thai media. This research employs a mixed-method research design. The quantitative method identifies word frequency, whereas the qualitative method describes semantics prosody. The self-constructed corpus of this research includes articles from the Bangkok Post and the Nation Thailand, two widely known Thai media, analyzed using Sketch Engine software. In this research, ten collocates for “Jokowi”, “Joko Widodo”, and “Mr Widodo” were identified. From the semantic prosody investigation, “Mr Widodo” tends to have neutral to positive semantic prosody; “Jokowi” tends to have neutral to negative, and “Joko Widodo” has mixed semantic prosody with neutral, positive, and some negative meanings.

Semantic prosody of deictic verbs in the Holy Qurʾān: a corpus study

Studies that examine the semantic proprsody of words in the Qurʾān focus on words with negative or positive meanings as part of their denotations (i.e., core meanings). On the other hand, a few other studies place greater importance on collocates than on concordance lines or the pragmatic function of the phrase where the word occurs. Thus, the aim of the present study is to examine the semantic prosody of three groups of frequent deictic verbs in the Holy Qurʾān: (a) verbs denoting came as dʒaːʔ , ħaˈḍara , and ʔataː , (b) those with the meaning of brought, such as dʒaːʔ (bi- ) and ʔataː (bi- ) , and (c) verbs that mean sent (i.e., ˈnazzala , ˈʔanzala , ʔarsala , baʕaθa ). Some of the examined verbs are near synonyms, while others share the same root or word pattern. The study is qualitative and quantitative based on two corpora (i.e., the Qurʾānic Arabic Corpus and the Qurʾān Annotated Corpus in Sketch Engine). For the quantitative part, I used a number of statistical measures to identify frequent collocates of deictic verbs, and for the qualitative part, I checked concordance lines to decide on the evaluative meaning associated with each deictic verb. Further, a statistical test of ANOVA was used to identify which deictic meaning is significantly associated with which attitudinal evaluation. Results reveal that more than half of the deictic verbs (e.g., dʒaːʔ and ʔataː as came and brought and ˈʔaħḍara as brought) are negative. Further, verbs based on the same root or giving the same meaning do not necessarily suggest the same semantic prosody. More importantly, accompanying words no matter how significantly they occur with certain verbs are not sufficient to impose a certain semantic prosody on the verb in a specific context. This indicates that semantic prosody is determined by intentions, contexts, pragmatic functions, collocates, and grammatical constructions. Therefore, it is recommended that researchers examine the semantic prosody of other deictic verbs and analyse the role of prepositions following deictic verbs in determining the semantic prosody of verbs in the Qurʾān.

A Linguistic Corpus-Based Analysis of the Synonym Differences

In learning vocabulary, synonyms become a big difficulty for Indonesian language learners as a second language, because they have the same or similar semantic meanings. The emergence of the corpus has brought about new research methods for the identification and analysis of synonyms. This study aims to compare semantic collocations and prosody of Indonesian synonyms 'secepat' and 'so that' so as to find differences in usage between the two words. This research method uses qualitative and quantitative methods. The results of this study are: the frequency of 'secepat' is higher than 'soleh' in the Indonesian Web Corpus (IndonesiaWeC), and 'soleh' is only side by side with the class of prepositions. Meanwhile, words that are collocated 'so' tend to be personal pronouns. There are 6 similar collocations between 'so' and 'so that'. Meanwhile, 'so that' and 'so that' have the same semantic prosody that is neutral.

Framing flooding in African Cities: A corpus-assisted discourse analysis of the phenomenon in the Ghanaian Press

Abstract Increasing climate change and urban planning deficiencies have exacerbated flood disasters in African cities, attracting widespread media discussion and public concern. This study examines the discursive construction of perennial flooding in Accra, in the Ghanaian press, to bring to light how the phenomenon is represented with regards to whether or not it contributes to a proper appreciation of the situation in attempting to address the problem. It uses as dataset an 86,602-word specialised corpus built from news reports on flooding and a 422,436-word reference corpus (written component of International Corpus of English, Ghana). The study employs a Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) approach to explore the discourse using Keyword analysis, Concordance lines and Collocate analysis. Findings revealed framing of perennial flooding in the city as an unwelcome threat, as it is found to colligate with: “problems, damage, death and loss”, giving it a negative discourse prosody. In addition, there is unclear (de)construction of the major cause of the floods in the news, as experts assert that siltation of the drains is the major challenge, but what is often projected by the media as the cause is choked gutters. The findings inform policymakers that robust proactive measures, public education and sensitisation, and a firm commitment on the part of the government in particular are needed to tackle the perennial floods in Accra.

Collocation and Semantic Prosody of Synonimy in French: magnifique and superbe

This paper aims to find the differences of two near-synonym in French, especially in term of its collocation distribution and semantic prosody. Two French adjectives, extraordinaire and remarquable which have the same core meaning, are the object of this analysis. Corpus linguistic method was used in collecting data from French corpora in Leipzig Corpora Collection and AntConc tool was used to obtain their collocates and their frequency of occurrence. Meaning aura or semantic prosody provides knowledge about the nuances caused by each adjective in a particular context. The results of the analysis show that magnifique and superbe show many similarities in meaning because they have high colloquial similarity, but there are still differences that can be used as distinguishing aspects of the two adjectives. The semantic prosody of magnifique shows a very positive nuance, while superbe can produce positive and neutral nuances.

A corpus-based cognitive analysis of metaphors of gender issues in national media

The identification of conceptual metaphors of gender issues in the national media using corpus linguistic analysis has constructed a discourse based on the correlation between experience and linguistic feature phenomena. This research identifies and reveals three conceptual metaphors based on word frequency, collocation, and concordance. A combined method with an explanatory sequential design was used by collecting Koran Sindo news in 2022–2023 that represented gender issues; there were 210 news articles with 71,920 words. Data collection techniques are documentation, listening, and note-taking using data analysis in AntConc and interactive models. The results of this study are as follows: first, the highest frequency of words is significantly found in the words 'korban' and 'perempuan.' Secondly, collocations have a contradictory tendency to present gender issues. Third, concordance produces identifying forms of conceptual metaphors, such as: a) 4 structural metaphors, conceptually meaning sexual coercion, rape, provider power, and necessity; b) 2 orientational metaphors have conceptual meanings, such as urgency and period; c) 3 ontological metaphors with conceptual meanings include deterioration, qualification, and capacity. This research contributes to exploring cognitive semantic prosody through the phenomenon of lexical and linguistic features.

Sudut Pandang Dan Kefahaman Warganet Terhadap Zakat Semasa Pandemik Covid-19 Di Malaysia Berdasarkan Teori Prosodi Semantik

The COVID-19 pandemic has left a huge impact on economic activities, thus affecting the people. The evidence is that 1.78 million data extracted from social media is related to socioeconomic issues. One of the most talked about topics is the issue of zakat (alms) in Malaysia. Intrigued by these problems, this article aims to examine the viewpoint and understanding of the alms, especially in relation to applications and helplines, as well as the issues of confusion in the meaning and concept of alms. By using the keyword [zakat] obtained through the virtual advertising operation on Facebook data, the study examined 35,000 posts (reply comments) detected from January to June 2020. All data analysed are based on the semantic prosody theory which expresses the view that each word has its own consistent aura, thus enabling it to be transferred and its meaning attached to other words in a sentence. The results of the analysis found that both issues highlighted often showed the collocation of the word [zakat] with the words [mohon/apply], [proses/process], [konsep/concept], [makna/meaning] and [asnaf/a group of Muslims worthy of receiving Muslim tithe or]. The understanding of the collocation relationship displays two forms of difficulties in alms which are difficulty in understanding the process and procedure of alms application and difficulty in understanding the concept and meaning of [zakat] and its details. The analysis also found that both issues were discussed cynically, causing misunderstanding if not properly addressed. This situation indicates that no matter how small the issue is raised, it should be taken care of in order to ensure that the alms management can be preserved in the name of Islam.

Corpus-Based Studies on Translator’s Style: Retrospect and Prospect

The past 20 years have seen significant advances in the corpus-based studies on translator’s style, an important subfield of corpus-based translation studies. However, there is still a lack of a coherent and clear understanding of the research models, objects of study, and methodologies. This paper classifies different research models, reviews the representative achievements of the studies, analyzes the limitations of current research, and provides suggestions for future studies. This paper argues that the existing research methods need to be expanded, the objects should be enriched, and the research model requires further investigation. Studies in the future should expand the current research methodology from primary quantitative studies to semantic, pragmatic and socio-cultural parameters. Greater focus should be placed on analyzing the translator’s style as demonstrated by linguistic features, such as language collocation and semantic prosody, as well as the subtext of the translated work, and non-linguistic features, such as the translator’s choice of material for translation. Furthermore, attention must be paid to the examination of both the preferred linguistic patterns that the translator uses to reproduce the source text and the recurrence of these patterns across the translator’s other translations of works by different authors.

“Language of Values” in Domestic Internet Media: Cognitive-and-Discursive Aspect

The article discusses the problem of detecting and interpreting the value components of Russian words in the Internet media discourse, which do not have an explicit language expression. The method of cognitive-and-discursive analysis of corpus data is applied. It is based on the research technique of identifying semantic auras (semantic prosody) of the word studied in its immediate contextual environment in texts. The material under study is comprised of contexts extracted from the newspaper corpus as part of the Russian National Corpus. The relative adjective progressivnyj (progressive, advanced), which does not have any evaluativeness in the lexical-semantic system of the Russian language, in its discursive realization demonstrates an implicit positive or negative evaluation, induced in the context, regularly arises. The author came to the conclusion that positive evaluation associated with the semantic components “promoting progress, advanced” and “imbued with advanced ideas, sentiments” is most often realized. However, in a number of uses, the immediate or further contextual environment contributes to implication and negative evaluation, which is caused by ideas about “excessive” progressiveness, i.e. exceeding the norm, from the speaker’s point of view, and that progress also concerns the negative aspects of social or cultural life.

A multifactorial approach to war and corruption metaphors in South Asian Englishes

Abstract The present paper provides a corpus‐based study of war and corruption metaphors in South Asian Englishes (specifically Indian English, Bangladeshi English, Nepali English and Pakistani English). Considering the highly news‐relevant nature of these concepts, the South Asian Varieties of English corpus (SAVE2020) serves as the database. In an initial step, we outline the source domains at different levels of schematicity used to construe war and corruption, revealing the salient domains at location and person. By pursuing a multifactorial approach, this study aims at answering the question whether the choice of source domain is governed by the sociolinguistic factors gender and variety, and intra‐linguistic factors, for example, length and semantic prosody of the metaphor‐related words. It furthermore investigates whether multifactorial analyses, which are still a novelty within research on metaphor variation, constitute a suitable methodological approach. By doing so, our research demonstrates the need to complement this quantitative approach with a qualitative one that offers a more fine‐grained description of the source domains used to structure metaphorical concepts like war and corruption.

Gender Order, Microcelebrities, and the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis of the Representation of Wanghong Women in China’s English-Language Newspapers

The term “ wanghong women” has been in a state of flux in China’s public discourse since its inception in 2015. In particular, the COVID-19, while causing major economic setbacks across the world, has, to some extent, boosted the growth of the wanghong industry and altered public attitude towards wanghong women in China. Against this background, this study aims to investigate how wanghong women are linguistically represented in the six leading official English language newspapers in China. A corpus-assisted discourse analysis of 156 English news articles (i.e., 140,931 words), covering the years between 2015 and 2022, was conducted. The study revealed a significant attitudinal shift in the editorial stance on China’s wanghong women phenomenon since the COVID-19 epidemic: the semantic prosodies of the word “ wanghong” has shifted from women who are stereotypically young, fashionable, and attract online attention by using pretty face and sexualized body shape to women who can boost the national digital economy, contribute to the state’s agenda of rural regeneration, and help spread timely instructions regarding the pandemic. The findings shed new light on the evolving Chinese gender politics which is shaped by the entangled forces of traditional patriarchy, commercialization, and the government’s crisis management strategies during the pandemic.

Evaluation in a cross-linguistic perspective: Investigating semantic prosody across English and German near-synonyms

The present study follows in the path of previous research on semantic prosody, shifting its focus to the domain of near-synonymy analysed from a cross-linguistic perspective. The targeted items are English and German near-synonymous schemata expressing a sense of persuasion. The aim is to assess whether there are notable differences and/or overlaps in their evaluative behaviour and pragmatic function. Results highlight an “evaluative gap” existing between the English and German patterns, reflected in subtle differences in meaning nuances not always picked up by dictionary definitions. These results are discussed in the light of their relevance for translation and contrastive studies, as well as their practical implications for corpus-assisted lexicography.