SEMANTIC PROSODY AND PREFERENCE OF “HEALTHY” AND “UNHEALTHY” COLLOCATIONS IN COVID-19 CORPUS

This study is conducted in order to know the collocations of ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ as well as to explore the lexical meaning of those collocations. Corpus-based approach is employed in this study since the sole source of the data is the corpus data. Qualitative research method is used in order to find the hypotheses from the corpus data which is taken from Sketch Engine. The results demonstrate that the collocations of two node words are dissimilar in the categorization. ‘healthy’ node word indicates that three major semantic preferences are associated with it - human, animal, disease. On the contrary, the semantic preferences of ‘unhealthy’ node word are diverse. Thus, the classification is based on the meaning of the collocations. The collocations with negative meaning occur more frequently than those with positive meaning. It is due to the fact that they use the prefixes –in and –un which create the opposite meaning of the original word. Therefore, the negative semantic prosody is more frequently found the two node words – ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’.

A Corpus-based Contrastive Study on English and Chinese Semantic Prime happen and fasheng in Natural Semantic Metalanguage

This paper reports a corpus-based study on English and Chinese semantic prime happen and fasheng in Natural Semantic Metalanguage. With the aids of computer software Wordsmith 5.0 and SPSS19.0, we conducted a contrastive study on happen and fasheng based on a small English and Chinese comparable corpus constructed by ourselves. By extracting evidence from the corpus, the distribution of happen and fasheng, their syntactic patterns, their colligation types as well as their semantic prosody are identified and analyzed. We found that there is no significant difference between English semantic prime happen and its Chinese counterpart fasheng with respect to their distribution, their syntactic patterns, their colligations, and their semantic prosody. The results reveal that semantic prime happen is identical with its Chinese counterpart fasheng. Thus it provides an evidence to justify the premise of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage Theory.

Skojarzenia werbalne w Narodowym Korpusie Języka Polskiego: przyczynek do badań nad werbalnym stereotypem "inwalidy"

Verbal Associations in the National Corpus of Polish: A Contribution to the Study of the Verbal Stereotype of inwalida ‘an invalid’ The role of corpus research in linguistics and in related fields of study has increased in recent decades. Searching for and analysis of collocations and concordances of a lexical unit, which makes it possible to determine its semantic preferences and semantic prosody, can be a tool for studying stereotypes, understood as overly generalized and simplified evaluative and affective images of a fragment of reality named by the lexical unit. The aim of this article is to verify the validity of supplementing studies based on the analysis of corpus resources with data obtained in free association tests. The study focuses on the lexical unit inwalida ‘an invalid’ as the name of a concept which may be subject to strong stereotyping. The resources of the balanced sub-corpus of the National Corpus of Polish, consisting of about 250 million words, were searched for associative responses to the word inwalida given by at least 2 people from a group of 40 Polish speakers. In the corpus, the co-occurrence of the word inwalida was checked with each of the 33 obtained associations, using a search tool to identify the contexts (concordances) containing both words – inwalida and the association – with an interval of 0 and ≤5. The results of the study indicate that an association test can be a significant complement to corpus data analyses: it can provide important elements of semantic prosody which are not found in corpus analysis results, it can guide concordance search and it can indicate the elements which are the most important for the meaning of the examined word. Skojarzenia werbalne w Narodowym Korpusie Języka Polskiego: przyczynek do badań nad werbalnym stereotypem inwalidy W ostatnich dziesięcioleciach wzrasta rola badań korpusowych w językoznawstwie i naukach pokrewnych. Wyszukiwanie i analiza kolokacji i konkordancji określonej jednostki leksykalnej, pozwalające na określenie jej preferencji semantycznej i prozodii semantycznej, mogą stanowić narzędzie badania stereotypów, rozumianych jako nadmiernie uogólnione i uproszczone oceniająco-afektywne obrazy fragmentu rzeczywistości nazywanego przez daną jednostkę leksykalną. Celem analizy przedstawionej w artykule jest weryfikacja zasadności uzupełniania badań opartych na analizie zasobów korpusowych danymi uzyskanymi w teście skojarzeń swobodnych. Przeprowadzona analiza dotyczy jednostki leksykalnej inwalida, jako nazwy pojęcia podlegającego silnej stereotypizacji. W zasobach liczącego około 250 milionów słów podkorpusu zrównoważonego Narodowego Korpusu Języka Polskiego poszukiwano reakcji skojarzeniowych na hasło inwalida podanych przez minimum 2 osoby z 40-osobowej grupy użytkowników języka polskiego. Sprawdzono w korpusie współwystępowanie wyrazu inwalida kolejno z każdym z 33 uzyskanych skojarzeń, używając do tego celu narzędzia szukającego kontekstów (konkordancji) zawierających oba wyrazy – inwalida i skojarzenie – w odstępie 0 oraz ≤5. Wykazano, że test skojarzeniowy może w sposób istotny uzupełniać analizy korpusowe poprzez: dostarczanie ważnych elementów prozodii semantycznej, których nie ma w wynikach analiz korpusowych, ukierunkowanie wyszukiwania konkordancji oraz wskazywanie elementów najważniejszych dla znaczenia badanego wyrazu.

DOES PANDEMIC HAVE A SILVER LINING? A CONTRASTIVE CORPUS STUDY OF COLLOCATIONS WITH PANDEMIC IN MEDIA TEXTS

The research is devoted to the contrastive corpus analysis of the semantic prosody of collocations with PANDEMIC in the broadsheet ‘The Guardian’ and the tabloid ‘The Mirror’. The corpora have been processed with the help of Sketch Engine and the collocations with PANDEMIC have been analysed. The study mostly concentrates on the verbs with PANDEMIC as subject and object as most representative in media texts. The dictionary definition of PANDEMIC interprets it as a word with negative semantic prosody. The discourse analysis of the data obtained proves that collocations containing this collocate have negative semantic colouring as well. The following verbs start, hit, lead, cause, force, mean, devastate, which are common for both newspapers, represent PANDEMIC as a metaphorical image of a disaster, and the verbs specific for ‘The Mirror’ – bring, abate, inflict, scupper, kill, give, show, go on – support the given picture. However, the verbs unique for ‘The Guardian’ – strike, affect, shine, reveal, create, take, turn, remain – mostly outline the starting point or describe problems people have to face during pandemic times. Still some verbs in ‘The Guardian’, for example exacerbate and stop, also contribute to the frightening portrayal of a supernatural power terrorising humans. Both newspapers sketch personal stories, describe problems in business, trading, travelling, but ‘The Guardian’ puts more emphasis on international affairs and governments’ decisions and responsibility.

Semantic Prosody in Translation: Slovene and English ADV-V combinations

Semantic prosody is perhaps the most elusive meaning component established to date, and the present paper is a corpus-driven attempt to elucidate the meaning-forming process in some of the most frequent lexical items in Slovene and English. The underlying methodology is based on the novel top-down approach, which provides a semantically unmotivated point of view and is based on raw data, i.e., frequency of occurrence. The paper features a comparison of the pervasiveness of evident semantic prosody in high-frequency lexical items in Slovene and English, respectively. In closing it also deals with the problems involved in L1-L2 translation of the observed extended units of meaning, where possible translation equivalents exhibit varying levels of (mis)match in their semantic prosodies.

EXPLORING SEMANTIC PROSODIC AWARENESS LEVELS OF EFL LEARNERS THROUGH NEAR-SYNONYM WORDS

Near-synonyms are semantically similar words, but they are not always interchangeable, having a variety of collocational and semantic behaviours. Tertiary level EFL learners’ use of near synonyms demonstrates significant differences in terms of word choices. This article investigates (1) the level of semantic prosodic (SP) awareness in EFL learners, (2) the correlation between their SP awareness and English proficiency levels, (3) the ways EFL learners use semantic prosodic features in their speech and written productions and how they cope with challenges in SP and (4) the factors affecting their SP knowledge. The data were analysed quantitively and qualitatively. A proficiency test, a semantic prosody test, an open-ended questionnaire and a structured interview were used respectively. The findings reveal that learners’ SP knowledge correlates with language proficiency, but their awareness levels have little to do with the proficiency. One implication for the curriculum developers is that they should consider including relevant content related to the semantic prosody in syllabi so that the students will be able to create semantically relevant sentences like their native counterparts. <p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0798/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>