Semantic Prosody: A Critical Evaluation

193 Pages·2009·1.22 MB·English

by  Dominic Stewart

Semantic Prosody
Routledge Advances in Corpus Linguistics
EDITED BY TONY MCENERY, Lancaster University UK
MICHAEL HOEY, Liverpool University, UK
1. Swearing in English 8. Public Discourses of Gay Men
Bad Language, Purity and Power Paul Baker
from 1586 to the Present
Tony McEnery 9. Semantic Prosody
A Critical Evaluation
2. Antonymy Dominic Stewart
A Corpus-Based Perspective
Steven Jones
3. Modelling Variation in Spoken
and Written English
David Y. W. Lee
4. The Linguistics of
Political Argument
The Spin-Doctor and the Wolf-Pack
at the White House
Alan Partington
5. Corpus Stylistics
Speech, Writing and Thought
Presentation in a Corpus of
English Writing
Elena Semino and Mick Short
6. Discourse Markers
Across Languages
A Contrastive Study of Second-Level
Discourse Markers in Native and
Non-Native Text with Implications for
General and Pedagogic Lexicography
Dirk Siepmann
7. Grammaticalization and English
Complex Prepositions
A Corpus-Based Study
Sebastian Hoffman
Semantic Prosody
A Critical Evaluation
Dominic Stewart
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First published 2010
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stewart, Dominic.
Semantic prosody : a critical evaluation / by Dominic Stewart.
p. cm. — (Routledge advances in corpus linguistics ; 9)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Semantic prosody. I. Title.
P325.5.S55S84 2009
401'.43—dc22
2009011173
ISBN 0-203-87007-7 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN10: 0-415-80440-X (hbk)
ISBN10: 0-203-87007-7 (ebk)
ISBN13: 978-0-415-80440-0 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978-0-203-87007-5 (ebk)
To the assorted Mrs, Ms and Mr Stewarts of my family

Contents
List of Tables ix
Acknowledgements xi
Introduction 1
1 Features of Semantic Prosody 6
2 The Evaluative and the Hidden 21
3 The Diachronic and the Synchronic 41
4 Semantic Prosody and Lexical Environment 56
5 Semantic Prosody and Corpus Data 79
6 Semantic Prosody and the Concordance 104
7 Intuition, Introspection and Corpus Data 122
8 Semantic Prosody and Lexical Priming 152
9 Conclusions 159
Notes 167
Bibliography 171
Index 177

Tables
I.1 BNC Concordance to ‘break/breaks/breaking/broke/
broken out’ as Verb (Random Selection of 30/1,126) 2
2.1 BNC Concordance to ‘snobbish’ (Random Selection of 30/60) 35
2.2 Concordance to ‘bent on’ in Louw 1993 (Alphabetical
Sorting at R1) 37
4.1 Concordance to ‘budge’ in Sinclair 1998 62
4.2 BNC Concordance to ‘harness/ harnesses/ harnessing/
harnessed’ as Verb (Random Selection of 30/449) 64
4.3 BNC Concordance to ‘shoehorn’ (All 7 Occurrences) 65
4.4 BNC Concordance to ‘shoehorned’ 65
4.5 BNC Concordance to ‘more fl exible’ (Random 30/425) 68
4.6 BNC Concordance to ‘from bad to worse’ (All 41
Occurrences, Alphabetical Sorting at L1, L2) 70
4.7 BNC Concordance to ‘alleviate/alleviates/alleviating/
alleviated’ (Random 30/547. Alphabetical Sorting at R1, R2) 74
5.1 Concordance to ‘somewhat’ in Bublitz 1996 86
5.2 BNC Concordance to ‘undergo’ in All Its Forms
(Random 30/2,434, Alphabetical Sorting at R1, R2) 92
5.3 Concordance to ‘days are’ in Louw 1993 (Alphabetical
sorting at R1) 101
6.1 BNC Concordance to ‘utterly’ (Random 30/1,251,
Alphabetical Sorting at R1) 109
6.2 Concordance to ‘sat/sits/sitting through’ in Hunston 2002
(Alphabetical Sorting at R1) 112
7.1 BNC Concordance to ‘intuition/intuitions’ (Random 30/547) 123