Solving contradictions in semantic prosody analysis with prosody concord
Xuri Tang, Gaixiang Liu · International Journal of Corpus Linguistics · 2018
Abstract Using collocation-based approaches, semantic prosody analyses of lemmas likealleviateandcureyield judgments of negative prosody, which contradict common sense. This poses a challenge to the concept of semantic prosody and the principle of co-occurrence. To solve such contradictions, this paper proposes a new approach to semantic prosody analysis named ‘prosody concord’. The approach adopts collostruction as the locus of analysis on the basis of the explication of the unit of meaning model, and uses a mechanism for semantic prosody determination that incorporates multiple sources of information such as interactions of words, collocations, colligations and semantic preferences. Case studies of the lemmasbudge, credibility, causeandalleviateshow that the proposed approach can solve the contradictions and provide a consistent means for semantic prosody analysis.