Semantic preference and semantic prosody-a theoretical overview

Semantic preference and semantic prosody-a theoretical overview

ISSN 2566-4638
DOI 10.14706/JEH2018121

International Burch University

Journal of Education and Humanities
Volume 1 (2)

Winter 2018

Abstract: Semantic preference and semantic prosody are two notions that were carefully analysed in post-Firthian corpus linguistics and in the past few years there has been a growing interest in them. As corpora have become larger in size, and tools for extracting different lexical items for different purposes have been developed, the two terms have been addressed more frequently by linguists1. Throughout history, semantic preference and semantic prosody have sometimes been used for the same phenomenon but at other times the two were considered different but closely related. Previous corpus-based studies on the two terms have shown that they can be attached to many investigated lexical items. Therefore, this paper aims to present a detailed theoretical overview of the two terms in order to emphasise their immense importance for identifying the meaning of all the lexical items.

Mirna Begagić

Keywords: semantic preference, semantic prosody, corpus, corpus linguistics.