A semantic prosody analysis of three synonymous adjective pairs in COCA

Abstract

The concept of semantic prosody has attracted considerable research interests in the past two decades since Sinclair (1990) observed that “many uses of words and phrases show a tendency to occur in a certain semantic environment†(p. 112). Sinclair (2003) also noted that semantic prosody conveys its pragmatic meaning and attitudinal meaning. As the first scholar introducing the term ‘semantic prosody,’ Louw (1993) claimed that the habitual collocates of a lexical item is established through the semantic consistency of its subjects. Semantic prosody has thus been closely related to collocation learning in language acquisition research. In the context of collocation learning, near-synonyms particularly pose a difficulty for most foreign language learners due to their similar denotational meanings but un-interchangeable semantic prosody (Xiao & McEnery, 2006).

The present corpus-based study was designed to compare the semantic prosody with some synonymous pairs of academic core words in COCA (Gardner & Davies, 2013). The pairs were chosen based on the following criteria: a) their meanings were checked against Collins Thesaurus Online; b) the words with more than one meaning were removed; c) the word with more than one part of speech was defined the same as its paired word. All occurrences were examined manually at the span of 4 words to both the left and right. Three pairs of synonymous adjectives were reported. The report focused on the semantic preference and semantic prosody of the synonyms within academic concordance lines. Discussion and implications were included.