Semantic Prosody

Semantic Prosody is the first full-length treatment of semantic prosody, a concept akin to connotation but which connects crucially with typical lexical environment. For example, it has been claimed that the adverb 'utterly' is characterised by an unfavourable semantic prosody on account of its habitual co-occurrence with words denoting unfavourable states of affairs such as 'ridiculous', 'disgraceful' and 'miserable'. Primarily for this reason, semantic prosody has emerged almost exclusively within the field of corpus linguistics. However, the overall picture is complex, and this book offers a much-needed review of how semantic prosody has been described and approached in contributions on the subject, as well as a critical analysis of those contributions and a number of case studies. It discusses the relevance of the theory of priming in this area, and whether semantic prosody has cogency as a theoretical concept. Lastly, it points the way for future research. Since work on semantic prosody so far has been occasional, brief, and distributed across a range of monographs, articles and conference papers, this book, which does not assume previous knowledge of the subject, will constitute a fundamental work of reference for scholars, teachers and students alike. At the same time, Semantic Prosody goes beyond the central topic of the work, with wide-reaching implications for both corpus linguistics and linguistics overall. In this sense the concept of semantic prosody is used as a springboard for investigations into issues of vital importance for corpus studies such as the structuring and presentation of text in a corpus, the varying methodologies adopted by analysts to approach and interpret corpus data, as well as broader issues such as the role of intuition, introspection and elicitation in empirical language studies.

Semantic Prosody is the first full-length treatment of semantic prosody, a concept akin to connotation but which connects crucially with typical lexical environment. For example, it has been claimed that the adverb 'utterly' is characterised by an unfavourable semantic prosody on account of its habitual co-occurrence with words denoting unfavourable states of affairs such as 'ridiculous', 'disgraceful' and 'miserable'. Primarily for this reason, semantic prosody has emerged almost exclusively within the field of corpus linguistics. However, the overall picture is complex, and this book offers a much-needed review of how semantic prosody has been described and approached in contributions on the subject, as well as a critical analysis of those contributions and a number of case studies. It discusses the relevance of the theory of priming in this area, and whether semantic prosody has cogency as a theoretical concept. Lastly, it points the way for future research. Since work on semantic prosody so far has been occasional, brief, and distributed across a range of monographs, articles and conference papers, this book, which does not assume previous knowledge of the subject, will constitute a fundamental work of reference for scholars, teachers and students alike. At the same time, Semantic Prosody goes beyond the central topic of the work, with wide-reaching implications for both corpus linguistics and linguistics overall. In this sense the concept of semantic prosody is used as a springboard for investigations into issues of vital importance for corpus studies such as the structuring and presentation of text in a corpus, the varying methodologies adopted by analysts to approach and interpret corpus data, as well as broader issues such as the role of intuition, introspection and elicitation in empirical language studies.

The two-volume proceedings, LNCS 13249 and 13250, constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 22nd Chinese Lexical Semantics Workshop, CLSW 2021, held in Nanjing, China in May 2021. The 68 full papers and 4 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 261 submissions. They are organized in the following topical sections: Lexical Semantics and General Linguistics; Natural Language Processing and Language Computing; Cognitive Science and Experimental Studies; Lexical Resources and Corpus Linguistics.

Intensification plays a major role in spoken and written interaction, enabling the writer or speaker to express different levels of commitment. This book explores the patterns and meanings of intensifiers in Chinese learner English by ways of comparison with native English. The study is conducted within the theoretical framework of Firthian contextual theory of meaning, Sinclairian model of Extended Units of Meaning (EUM) and Hunston's pattern grammar. The method of contrastive inter-language analysis (CIA) is adopted and the intensifier collocations in learner English and native English are explored by means of quantitative and qualitative analyses of corpora data. This book is the first attempt to investigate the patterning and meaning features of intensifiers systematically with the corpora data in Chinese learner English. Readers will obtain a relatively complete picture of how Chinese learners use intensifiers to realize their attitudinal meanings.

These specially-commissioned studies cover corpus-informed approaches to researching, teaching and learning English for Specific Purposes (ESP). The corpora used range from very large published corpora to small tailor-made collections of written and spoken text, as well as parallel and contrastive corpora, in both the hard and softer sciences. Designed to tackle the problems faced by a variety of first- and second-language ESP users (specialised translators, undergraduates, junior and experienced researchers, and language trainers), the breadth of approaches enables treatment of issues central to ESP and corpus research, from corpus compilation and analysis to new applications and data-driven learning. The first full-length book on applied corpus use in France, Corpus-Informed Research and Learning in ESP will be of interest not only to those working in the French context, but to a wide variety of language professionals – teachers, researchers or course designers – in many countries looking at ESP from different linguistic, cultural and educational perspectives.

Covering the major approaches to the use of corpus data, this work gathers together influential readings from leading names in the discipline, including Biber, Widdowson, Sinclair, Carter and McCarthy.

Stylistics has become the most common name for a discipline which at various times has been termed 'literary linguistics', 'rhetoric', 'poetics', 'literary philology' and 'close textual reading'. This Handbook is the definitive account of the field, drawing on linguistics and related subject areas such as psychology, sociology, anthropology, educational pedagogy, computational methods, literary criticism and critical theory. Placing stylistics in its intellectual and international context, each chapter includes a detailed illustrative example and case study of stylistic practice, with arguments and methods open to examination, replication and constructive critical discussion. As an accessible guide to the theory and practice of stylistics, it will equip the reader with a clear understanding of the ethos and principles of the discipline, as well as with the capacity and confidence to engage in stylistic analysis.

Corpus linguistics is the study of language data on a large scale - the computer-aided analysis of very extensive collections of transcribed utterances or written texts. This textbook outlines the basic methods of corpus linguistics, explains how the discipline of corpus linguistics developed and surveys the major approaches to the use of corpus data. It uses a broad range of examples to show how corpus data has led to methodological and theoretical innovation in linguistics in general. Clear and detailed explanations lay out the key issues of method and theory in contemporary corpus linguistics. A structured and coherent narrative links the historical development of the field to current topics in 'mainstream' linguistics. Practical tasks and questions for discussion at the end of each chapter encourage students to test their understanding of what they have read and an extensive glossary provides easy access to definitions of technical terms used in the text.