Collocations and Semantic Prosody

What is Meaning?
It is not in the lexeme but in extended units of meaning. It is idiosyncratic and context-dependant. It is typically dispersed over several word-forms which habitually co-occur in the text. The co-occurring word-forms share semantic features.

What is Meaning?
Invented and decontextualized examples may exaggerate difficulties of interpretation. A theory of semantics should deal primarily with normal cases: what does typically occur, not what might occur under strange circumstances.

The meaning of words and phrases differs according to their use in different linguistic and social contexts.

Lexical Semantics vs. Corpus Semantics

Lexical semantics: entails independent word meaning denotation is the main interest no description of meaning in language use vs. Corpus semantics: studies how words are used in text and discourse uses corpus evidence to study meaning a major finding is that words and phrases convey evaluations

History
1737 - a concordance of the Bible. 1790 - an index to words in Shakespeare. 1909 - a work on the stylistics of French in which idiomatic multiword 'phraseological units' were pointed out. 1933 - an article on 'many odd comings-together-of words'. 1950s - the term KWIC originates. 1957 - an article defining 'collocation'. 1963-1969 - the 'OSTI report'. 1970s - computer-assisted project reveals that phraseology is the area of intersection between grammar and lexicon. 1996 - the discovery that meaning is not isolated in the lexeme but in 'extended units of meaning'.

Co-occurrence Relations
Types of co-occurrence relations in extended lexicosemantic units: collocation colligation semantic preference semantic prosody

Collocation
It is a frequent co-occurrence of word forms: RANCID BUTLER

Colligation
It is a co-occurrence of grammatical choices: CASES + quantifiers = IN SOME CASES

Semantic Preference
It is a lexical set of frequently occurring collocates from the same lexical field with a semantic feature: LARGE + 'quantities and sizes' NUMBER, SCALE, PART, AMOUNTS

Semantic Prosody
It is a motivation of speaking; moreover, some word forms are followed by words with certain connotations, either positive or negative: CAUSE + PROBLEMS, SERIOUS ILLNESS, DEATH, DAMAGE and so on

Semantic Profiles
A word form is likely to be followed by something positive or negative: good/positive semantic profiles vs. bad/negative semantic profiles

Semantic Profiles
+ PROVIDE + FACILITIES, INFORMATION, SERVICES, AID and so on SET IN + ROT, DECAY, BITERNESS and so on

Semantic Prosody and Human Intuition

Semantic prosody is inaccessible to human intuition and cannot be retrieved reliably through introspection.

Usefulness of Semantic Prosody

Usefulness: lexicography text and discourse analysis text production foreign language teaching

In Lexicography
Lexicographers include into dictionaries obvious, inherent, negative/positive values of a lexeme: CAUSE: make something happen vs. CAUSE: make something bad happen

In Text and Discourse Analysis

The semantic profile of a given word could be used as the basis for investigating perception/the status of objects or concepts in a particular context, either generally speaking or within specific discourses:

TELEVISION/TELLY + 'lazy/passive verbs' SPRAWLED, PLONKED, CURLED UP, LOUNGE, INSTALLED, VEGETATE, SLUMPED = mindless, passive activity engaged in by people who are weak-willed, witless, exhausted to do something else

In Text and Discourse Analysis

An awareness of semantic prosody could be useful for native and non-native language users in uncovering hidden attitudes in texts: MAD DOG GADAFY

In Text Production
Persuasive writing: semantic prosodies can be of great assistance in the persuasion industry: propaganda, advertising and promotional copy can be gradable against the semantic prosodies

In Text Production
Translation: semantic prosody could shift the focus from individual lexemes to more meaningful units. semantic prosody could show that equivalent words may have developed differently in two languages and therefore developed different prosodies. ability to interpret evaluation in a source text and the semantic profiles of translation choices in the target language.

In Foreign Language Teaching

An awareness of semantic prosody reduces the risk of triggering the wrong/unfortunate collocations in the foreign language and misinterpreting the more subtle evaluative meaning.

KWIC
a pattern can be aligned in the centre of the page or screen concordance lines can be re-ordered to the left and right lines can be alphabetically or by frequence re-displayed in order to make patterns visible

Views
Traditional View: Semantics cannot be empirical because meaning is cognitive and conceptual, and therefore impossible to study via observable data. vs. Alternative View: 'Meaning in use' is clearly observable in texts.

Techniques
concordancing a large number of texts in KWIC format permuting and redisplaying node words in concordance lines extracting recurrent fixed word-strings (and their minor variants) calculating the strength of attraction between co-selected words

PIE
Three types of recurrent strings to be extracted from the BNC: n-grams are uninterrupted strings of 1 to 8 orthographic wordforms p(hrase)-frames are n-grams with one variable lexical slot PoS-grams are strings of part of speech tags

Other Methods
Expectations. The interpretation of what other people say or write depends partly on expectations of what is likely to occur. Communicative competence involves knowledge (often unconscious) of what is probable, frequent and typical.

Real-world inferences. Sometimes interpretations depend on non-linguistic knowledge: that is, background, encyclopedic knowledge of the everyday world. Meanings are not always explicit, but implicit. Speakers can mean more than they say.

Other Methods
Linguistic conventions. However, (unconscious) knowledge of what is probable also involves expectations of language patterns. Knowledge of a language involves not only knowing individual words, but knowing very large numbers of phrases, and also knowing what words are likely to co-occur in a cohesive text. Text-types. Different text-types have different patterns of expectation.