Connotation and Semantic Prosody İDB 322

Connotation and Three Distinct Phenomena  Social and situational connotation – Markers of particular speech variety (class, regional origin, sex, age, relationships) E.g., absolutely awful (upper-middle class); beefy (colloquial use)  Cultural connotation – What a lexical item denotes within a culture. E.g., woman: frail, prone to tears, irrational, gentle, compassionate  Expressive connotation- Choosing to use certain lexical items implies favourable or unfavourable evaluation by the speaker towards what they describe. E.g., pig-headed: disapproval; I am firm, you are stubborn, he is pig-headed

Connotation-Semantic Prosody  Expressive connotation is a problem area for language learners.  One particular subtle and interesting aspect of expressive connotation is a phenomenon of semantic prosody and it can be highlighted by corpus data.

The verb commit Commit Unfavourable connotation, revealed via its collocates

The collocates of commit in BNCweb Log-like; MI results

The collocates of set in in BNCweb: MI results Cultural rot has set in. The first proof that the rot had set in at the Midland was the full disclosure of its profits and reserves in When campaigns ended in disaster and the submarine sank disillusionment and self-criticism set in. Undesirable process is being described. Sinclair (1987) set in is habitually associated with unpleasant events.

The unpleasant collocates of cause (Stubbs, 1995) BNCweb-MI listBNCweb-LL list

Favourable prosody of the word provide

What is semantic prosody?  Firth (1957) The term prosody is borrowed from Firth’s phonological colouring which spread beyond segmental boundaries.  Semantic prosody refers to the spreading of connotational colouring beyond single word boundaries.

Louw (1993): Prosodic clash  Writers sometimes diverge from the “expected profiles of semantic prosodies” with the intention of irony.  Eg. Bent on + unfavourbable items; bent on self- improvement  Fusion of corpus linguistics and lexicography is making the study of prosodic profiles feasible.

Learner dictionaries and prosodies  LDOCE 1987; Cobulid 1987 make explicit reference to prosodic behaviour of set in  E.g. if something unpleasant sets in, it begins and seems likely to continue (Cobuild 1987)  Peddle (v); peddler (n) : It is found to appear in unfavourable environments in journalistic writing.  LDOCE 1987 “usu derog” (usually derogatory)  Cobuild 1987 someone who is a peddler of particular ideas often expresses these ideas to other people.  1995: Three of four dictionaries include some explicit indication of the unfavourable character of this wordb

Prosodies and persuasion: sharp dealings  Less apparent prosodic behaviour of words: happen has a particular colouring on many occasions but not on all.  When the semantic prosody of an item is not deterministic, it may not apparent even to a native speaker’s intuition, but corpus data may show its statistical tendencies.  dealings: personal or business relations (LDOCE 1987)

Dealings in the newspaper corpus Dealings exhibited a strongly unfavourable prosody; it generally indicates some unattractive or dishonest activity. It is very frequently found in the company of words and phrases expressing dubious legality, such as investigation into, inquiry into, allegations about. People also deny, decline, refuse to discuss their dealings. Dealings with is common and the party named after the preposition is usually seen as pretty unsavoury, e.g, Hizbollah, the Mafia, Iraq, extremists. Favourable adjective with dealings: cordial dealings

The creation of prosodies  The creation of attitude through prosody is the use in newspaper of the word fundamentalist (s)  This is an “over-the-fence” word, a word used to describe outsider group: The Independent and The Daily Telegraph would not use the word to describe themselves.  Collocates: noun heads such as aggressors, blacklash, cults, fanatics, guerrillas, warlords; It right-collocates with abusive, armed, crazy, crude, militant, primitive, murderous  Semantic field: violence, mindlessness, underdevelopment  Green fundamentalist

Areas of further research  Learners’ awareness of the phenomenon of semantic prosody.  Concordance lines for well-known prosodies: commit or perpetrate ‘ carry out or commit a harmful, immoral, illegal action’  Compare collocation behaviour: persist and persevere  Adverb-adjective and adjective-noun head phrases in which the first word of the pair is an intensifier. Eg. Utterly has an unfavourable prosody.