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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

New York London

First published 2010
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016

Simultaneously published in the UK

by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2009.

To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.

© 2010 Taylor & Francis

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereaf-
ter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trade-

marks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

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 flexible’ (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
x Tables
7.2 Concordance to ‘intuition/intuitions’ (Non-random
selection) 124

7.3 BNC Concordance to ‘chill/chills/chilling/chilled’ as Verb

Followed by ‘my / your / his / her / its / our / their’
(Span of 5, Non-random Selection of 12/46) 131

7.4 BNC Concordance to ‘BE’ in All Its Forms Followed by

‘near’ Followed Immediately by a Full Stop (Span 5,
Non-random selection of 20/74) 132

7.5 BNC Concordance to ‘commit/committing/commits/

committed’ (Random Selection of 100/6,647, Alphabetical
Sorting at R1) 149
Acknowledgements

My deepest thanks go to:

• Michael Hoey, for his comments on the manuscript

• Sam Whitsitt, for his comments on part of the manuscript, and for all
those earnest conversations which made the train ride between Forlì
and Bologna seem so much shorter
• Guy Aston, Federico Zanettin and Silvia Bernardini, for their help
and support over the years
• two anonymous reviewers, whose insightful feedback really put me
straight.
Introduction

If I cast my mind back and try to recall what it was that persuaded me to
undertake a book on semantic prosody, it may be that my original objective
was simply to pin this concept down once and for all, to establish precisely
what semantic prosody is. Indeed when I began researching the subject,
interested colleagues would enquire about my investigations and ask me
what this arcane-sounding ‘semantic prosody’ might be. My response was
generally of a rambling, circuitous nature, more often than not expressed
in highly metaphorical terms, in view of the fact that semantic prosody
appears to attract metaphors like a light bulb attracts moths.
In retrospect it seems bizarre that I should have encountered such dif-
ficulty in proposing a cursory defi nition of the topic of my own research
project, but as I think will emerge already from the fi rst chapter of this
book, the notion of semantic prosody does seem somehow resistant to bite-
sized explanations. Certainly what comes across in the literature on corpus
linguistics is that the term ‘semantic prosody’ combines different interpre-
tations and embraces a broad range of features.
The most common interpretation—but by no means the only one or
even the most persuasive—tends to be couched in terms which I have para-
phrased as follows, with the explanation expressed through an example:

Semantic prosody is instantiated when a word such as CAUSE co-

occurs regularly with words that share a given meaning or meanings,
and then acquires some of the meaning(s) of those words as a result.
This acquired meaning is known as semantic prosody.

Purely for the purposes of preliminary illustration I shall provide an exam-

ple of this widespread approach through a very brief analysis of the verb
BREAK OUT in all its inflected forms.1 A search in the British National
Corpus (BNC) for this verb retrieves 1,126 occurrences. A random selec-
tion of these is reproduced in Table I.1.
The data reported would suggest that in the majority of cases the verb
BREAK OUT has conventionally undesirable things or states of affairs
in its immediate environment, above all as its grammatical subject (war,
2 Semantic Prosody

Table I.1 BNC Concordance to ‘break/breaks/breaking/broke/broken out’

as Verb (Random Selection of 30/1,126)

1. cattle plague is life. Fires keep breaking out. Rumours — that Fama of The
2 terrorists and was programmed to break out yesterday, wiping out all data
3. A new wave of IRA attacks then broke out early in 1979, including several
4. variety of levels showed signs of breaking out of the loyalist versus republican
5. 1880, The fi rst of the Boer wars broke out. W. E. Gladstone had returned as
6. 20 minutes, ‘Mill began to break out of their defensive shell and fi nd space
7. dismay to the news. Violencehad broken out, and there had been anti-Catholic
8. sound of it, World War II was breaking out behind her and after the race
9. debated in the Senate when war broke out three years later. The First World
10. Conservative press. ‘Labour war breaks out,’ said one paper. ‘Struggle over
11. roasted in their handcuffs if fi re breaks out. The VWA, one of five Dutch
12. Here we have a team unafraid to break out from any area of the field and run
13. a club versus country confl ict breaking out between Chelmsford and Essex
14. Thirdly, the way the war had broken out stamped the assumptions of the
15. unlikely to question why it should break out. It formed part of the accustomed
16. 1948 a communist insurrection had broken out in Burma. In Malaya, the
17. strikes the cattle, and skin infection breaks out on man and beast, carried by
18. the Marcher lords, open civil war broke out and Edward was forced to acquiesce
19. Weren’t sick then, were you?’ Rohmer broke out into an immediate, drenching
20. gleaming green with new foliage that had broken out from the charred branches
21. even before the current crisis broke out. Furthermore, United States Secretary
22. agree with authority, fearful to break out across the frontiers of duty and
23. will then have owner access after breaking out of the Captive environment.
24. approval listings can be inspected by breaking out to an editor using PF1/1
25. it looks like they could soon break out of the cult ghetto. But hopefully
26. why she came home. Kids have to break out. She didn’t do this to hurt you.
27. it seems that feminist art hasn’t broken out of the tine art ‘ghetto’. This is
28. Lane, North Allerton, when a blaze broke out in the lift shaft. The fi re started
29. A fi re brigade spokesman said the fi re broke out at a house in The Bank at
30. evacuated from a ward after a fi re broke out. Staff and fi re crews moved

conflict, infection, crisis). The apparent exceptions to this rule are few and
far between, for instance gleaming green with new foliage that had broken
out from the charred branches (line 20).
Habitual co-occurrences are often broken down into one or more seman-
tic sets (for BREAK OUT these sets could include, for instance, ‘situa-
tions of conflict’, ‘diseases’ or, more broadly, ‘problematic circumstances’),
and these have been described as the semantic preference(s) or semantic
association(s) of a given word. (As recommended by Hunston (2007:250),
‘word’ should really be in scare quotes because the core item may in reality
be of two or more words.) Now the substantial number of expressions rep-
resenting undesirable things in the immediate environment of the keyword
has been said to ‘colour’ or ‘infect’ it in some way (the metaphors of both
 Introduction 3
colour and infection have been consistently adopted in the literature), with
the result that BREAK OUT, while it may not necessarily be classified as a
word whose basic meaning is unfavourable, is considered to be associated
with an unfavourable semantic prosody or ‘aura of meaning’ which is con-
tingent upon its semantic preferences. In the case in point this process of
colouring would apply more readily to those occurrences where the mean-
ing of BREAK OUT corresponds to ‘start/develop suddenly’—the prosody
in these cases is such that if an expression representing a conventionally
favourable state of affairs, such as peace, is used as the subject of BREAK
OUT, then the effect may well be ironic or comic.
This, I repeat, is the most widespread interpretation of semantic prosody
in the literature on corpus linguistics, and in the fi rst instance it may seem
relatively unproblematic. However, once we go beyond the stage of the pre-
liminary defi nitions used in the literature, a closer analysis of the concept
reveals its complex and multi-faceted nature. Indeed, in accordance with
whichever of its multiple features is/are prioritised, it has been approached
in such diverse ways that it has ended up meaning markedly different things
to different people. This is perhaps to be expected when the concept in
question is as young as semantic prosody, but what is striking is that so far
there has been little acknowledgement by individual authors of the some-
times very diverse readings of it from one study to the next. Furthermore,
it can happen that confl icting positions are adopted within a single work,
again without any apparent recognition of this confl ict.
With this in mind, my principal aim in this book is to examine closely
all the various characteristics which have been attributed to this notion, in
order to assess (i) the validity of such characteristics when examined indi-
vidually, and (ii) whether such characteristics taken as a whole can be said
to justify semantic prosody as a unitary theoretical concept. I shall then
suggest ways in which we might attempt to reconcile the various descrip-
tions provided in the literature. Attendant upon my investigations are issues
of relevance for corpus linguistics in general, for example the way we seek
and interpret corpus data, and the relationship between word and environ-
ment. I should alert the reader straightaway that during the course of the
book I repeatedly discuss and frequently challenge studies conducted on
semantic prosody so far, above all in Chapters 5 and 6. This approach may
ultimately come across as tiresome, but it is my belief, fi rstly, that schol-
ars in any given field need to engage with each other directly in order to
move that field on, and, secondly, that many of the research premises and
theoretical foundations upon which work on semantic prosody is based lie
within treacherous terrain, and must be met head on if this concept and
field of analysis are to continue as an object of investigation.
In Chapter 1 a brief chronological review is provided of contributions
on semantic prosody—in particular of the way it has been defi ned—from
1987, when ideas behind this concept were fi rst propounded, until the
present day. It should be emphasised that very few of these contributions
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