[推荐]Contextual/semantic prosodic theory

当我一开始接触“语义韵”这个概念时，给我的第一感觉是“这不就是我们小学时学的词语的感情色彩”吗？
 
But semantic prosody is different from 褒义vs. 贬义. The former is collocational whereas the latter is connotational. See my posting on "Collocation, semantic prosody and near synonymy in English and Chinese" for further argument.
 
Words in Context:

Heffer, C, H. Sauntson and G. Fox (eds.) 2000. Words in Context: A tribute to John Sinclair on his Retirement. Birmingham: University of Birmingham.
 
回复：[推荐]Contextual prosodic theory

以下是引用 xiaoz 在 2005-7-6 20:52:33 的发言：
But semantic prosody is different from 褒义vs. 贬义. The former is collocational whereas the latter is connotational. See my posting on "Collocation, semantic prosody and near synonymy in English and Chinese" for further argument.
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My question is whether collocational patterns point to the semantics of words and phrases. If yes, such structural/formal/collocational information is basically another way of representing connotational meanings of words.

Is that so?
 
Connotational meanings are inherent while collocational meanings depend upon typicality and statistically central tendency.

[本贴已被 作者 于 2005年07月07日 20时29分44秒 编辑过]​
 
回复：[推荐]Contextual prosodic theory

以下是引用 xiaoz 在 2005-7-6 23:18:18 的发言：
Collocational meanings are inherent while collocational meanings depend upon typicality and statistically central tendency.
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The first "Collocational meanings" should be "Connotational meanings", right?

If so, connotational meanings are intuition-based and conventionally accepted and collocational meanings are dervied from corpus data, is that the case?

Again they point to the ambience of meaning, is that so?
 
Have corrected the typo in my posting.

Connotation is inherent in lexical meaning. For example, 恶果 and 苦果 always evaluate a result negatively wherever they occur. 结果 is often in a neutral context while 后果 typically evaluate a result negatively. 后果 keeps bad companies so frequently that a negative semantic prosody is its central tendency.

Intuitions alone are sufficient in spotting connotataions. While the evaluation of semantic prosodies also depend upon intuitions, corpus data is essential in revealing semantic prosodies in that it provides a basis for quantification.
 
回复：[推荐]Contextual prosodic theory

以下是引用 xiaoz 在 2005-7-7 21:01:04 的发言：
Have corrected the typo in my posting.

Connotation is inherent in lexical meaning. For example, 恶果 and 苦果 always evaluate a result negatively wherever they occur. 结果 is often in a neutral context while 后果 typically evaluate a result negatively. 后果 keeps bad companies so frequently that a negative semantic prosody is its central tendency.

Intuitions alone are sufficient in spotting connotataions. While the evaluation of semantic prosodies also depend upon intuitions, corpus data is essential in revealing semantic prosodies in that it provides a basis for quantification.
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First of all, the examples of 恶果, 苦果, 后果 and 结果 do not go against our intuition as native speakers of Chinese. In most case, our native sense on connotational meanings of words and phrases would correspond to the corpus evidence.
 
Also, we can see the our intuitive understanding toward lexical connotations, or rather collective intiution, viz. rules in grammar and rhetoric books, as the EMERGENT PROPERTIES of frequent use of certain linguistic items, in which corpus data are sampled.

Prof. Tao Hongyin discusses the semantic prosodies (though he did not use the term) of 发生 and 出现 in his paper Toward an Emergent View of Lexical Semantics and 出现类动词与动态语义学 respectively.
Tao, Hongyin. 2003. Toward an emergent view of lexical semantics. Language and Linguistics 4: 837-856. 这一篇google可以搜到的。这个杂志好像是台湾中研院的吧。
陶红印，2001，出现类动词与动态语义学，载于史有为主编《从语义信息到类型比较》，北京：北京语言文化大学出版社。
 
Agreed. Corpus evidence does not always run against intuitions. Intuitions are also important in corpus studies. The two are complementary.

When semantic prosodies for some lexical items are revealed by corpus research, some native speakers will say, "It is indeed so. But why didn't I think of that before?"

To test your L2 awareness in English, can you figure out the semantic prosodies for the following items (capitalization means lemma)? Try to find out their typical collcations and see what proportion of the total occurrences keeps a good/bad company.

SET in
HAPPEN
CONTROL
underage
a recipe for
GET oneself + past participle
 
回复：[推荐]Contextual/semantic prosodic theory

以下是引用 xiaoz 在 2005-7-8 0:31:45 的发言：
Agreed. Corpus evidence does not always run against intuitions. Intuitions are also important in corpus studies. The two are complementary.

When ssemantic prosodies for some lexical items are revealed by corpus research, some native speakers will say, "It is indeed so. But why didn't I think of that before?"

To test your L2 awareness in English, can you figure out the semantic prosodies for the following items (capitalization means lemma)? Try to find out their typical collcations and see what proportion of the total occurrences keeps a good/bad company.

SET in
HAPPEN
CONTROL
underage
a recipe for
GET oneself + past participle
Click to expand...

Interesting post. Richard, do not tell us the result. We can invite more visitors to judge the connotations of the words and phrases. Very interesting!
 
My answers:
SET in neutral
HAPPEN negative
CONTROL negative
underage postive
a recipe for postive
GET oneself + past participle negative
 
回复：[推荐]Contextual/semantic prosodic theory

有兴趣的话，可从这里下载：

http://www.alc.ucla.edu/Chinese/PUB/H_TAO/tao_verbs_of_appearing.pdf



以下是引用 xujiajin 在 2005-7-8 0:17:49 的发言：
Also, we can see the our intuitive understanding toward lexical connotations, or rather collective intiution, viz. rules in grammar and rhetoric books, as the EMERGENT PROPERTIES of frequent use of certain linguistic items, in which corpus data are sampled.

Prof. Tao Hongyin discusses the semantic prosodies (though he did not use the term) of 发生 and 出现 in his paper Toward an Emergent View of Lexical Semantics and 出现类动词与动态语义学 respectively.
Tao, Hongyin. 2003. Toward an emergent view of lexical semantics. Language and Linguistics 4: 837-856. 这一篇google可以搜到的。这个杂志好像是台湾中研院的吧。
陶红印，2001，出现类动词与动态语义学，载于史有为主编《从语义信息到类型比较》，北京：北京语言文化大学出版社。
Click to expand...
 
Perhaps most of all, semantic prosody can be dispersed in the whole text ,it is sometimes the soul of the text, the semantic prosody of individual word must be supported on the large corpus evidence, but we can deny the human intituion.
connotation is only a kind of meaning of a word,which is the extension meaning of denotation.
 
An interesting issue. Many corpus lingusits (e.g. Stubbs, Partington) appear to conflate semantic prosodies and connotations, but for Louw and me, they are different - semantic prosodies are collocational while connotations are inherent. See http://www.corpus4u.org/showthread.php?t=180 for corpus evidence to support this claim.

I found an example of semantic prosody in one of the papers attached in this thread - "impressive". Do you think the favorable evaluation is intrinsic to the lexical meaning this word?
 
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