语义韵

– Connotation is a feature of a single word/item, while SP resides in the collocational patterns of items in a text. Connotation is more evident and less hidden/sutble than SP. (Morley & Partington, 2009)
Semantic prosody:difficulty (through a larger context)
Compound lexical item/ELU: visibility+preposition+the naked eye
– Semantic preference is more concrete and collocationally detectable than semantic prosody. Semantic preference relates the node item to another item from a particular semantic set, while semantic prosody is an abstraction from wider stretches of text.
• The term “prosody” was borrowed from Firth who used it, as in “prosodic phonology”, to refer to phonological coloring which was capable of transcending segmental boundaries. E.g. Amen: the vowels are imbued with a nasal quality because of their proximity to the nasals m and n. (Louw, 1993)
– Semantic prosodies are not merely connotational. Whereas knowledge of connotations is often a form of schematic knowledge of repeatable events, semantic prosodies are more strictly functional or attitudinal. (Louw, 2000)
Origin
• The term “semantic prosody” was first used in print and introduced to the public by Louw (1993) who credited Sinclair with its coinage (“personal communication 1988”).
• Practically: an awareness of SP can be invaluable for the translator and language learner in distinguishing among items considered to be synonyms or translation equivalents.
• The concept of SP was developed by post-Firthian corpus linguists -- Sinclair, Louw, Stubbs, Partington and Hunston.
Clarification
• Q1: Is SP the same as connotation?
• Semantic prosody refers to POS/NEG connotation as well
as more complex attitudinal connotations, affecting both
single words and larger units of meaning such as phrases, i.e. concerns both ‘traditional’ connotation (said to relate to single words) and ‘prosodic’ connotation (connotation that is “distributed prosodically across a textual sequence”) (Bednarek, 2008)
E.g. “Your kind help caused my success in the exam.” “I would like to thank my supervisor for his persistent help and advice.”
• (Morley & Partington 2009)
– They interact with each other: S preference, contributes powerfully to building S prosody; S prosody dictates the general environment which constrains the preferential choices of the node item. (Partington, 2004)
• Semantic prosody: NEG
• Q 3: Is SP simply a two-term system as either POS or
NEG?
– Stubbs: NEG; POS; neutral/mixed prosody (Stubbs, 1996)
– After some initial confusion, corpus linguists have reached a general agreement in appreciating the POSNEG distinction at the heart of the notion of SP. The POS-NEG distinction is the essential simplicity at the heart of a complex system. (Partington, 2004)
A compound lexical item/ELU with four parameters--from concrete to abstract: collocation, colligation, semantic preference and semantic prosody
E.g. “the naked eye”
Collocation: N-1: with, to; N-2: see, visible, invisible; N-3: evident, undetectable
Colligation: preposition+the naked eye
Semantic preference: visibility
– E.g. wedding, funeral v.s. happen/build up
• Q 2: What’s the relationship between semantic prosody
and semantic preference?
– Sinclair’s model of ELU (extended lexical units): The units of meaning are somewhere between words and sentences. “So strong are the co-occurrence tendencies of words, word classes, meanings and attitudes that we must widen our horizons and expect the units of meanings to be much more extensive and varied than is seen in a single word.”(Sinclair, 1996)
• Semantic prosody is “the spreading of connotational colouring beyond single word boundaries”. (Partington, 1998: 68)
• A semantic prosody refers to a form of meaning which is established through the proximity of a consistent series of collocates, often characterisable as positive or negative, and whose primary function is the expression of the attitude of its speaker or writer towards some pragmatic situation. (Louw, 2000: 56)
Towards an Understanding of Semantic Prosody
You shall know a word by the company it keeps. —J. R. Firth
Significance
• Theoretically: SP is a fundamental aspect of the idiom or phraseological principle of language production and interpretation, in particular providing convincing evidence of how elements of meaning “hunt in packs” (i.e. the co-selection principle).