A Corpus-driven Study Of Semantic Prosody Of Business Trend Words

Semantic prosody refers to the consistent aura of meaning with which a form is imbued by its collocates. It is a phenomenon found after the advent of corpora, because it is hidden from people's intuition.Typically, semantic prosody is divided into positive semantic prosody, neutral semantic prosody, negative or mixed semantic prosody. The present study will follow this category during the analysis.This study analyzes the semantic prosody of eight business trend words, namely, recover, decrease, decline, expand, improve, fall, rise and increase, by the corpus-driven approach under guidance of a tentative theoretical framework brought forward by the author. This framework is the adaptation of Hoey's (2004) lexical priming and Sinclair's (2004) lexical model, which can illustrate the semantic prosody in a descriptive way.The findings show neutral semantic prosody dominates the eight business trend words as six of them have neutral semantic prosody. And the author uses the tentative theoretical framework to explain why neutral semantic prosody dominates the eight business trend words.This study intends to contribute on the Business English teaching/learning and Business English dictionary compilation. The author brings forward a new way of compiling words in Business English dictionaries, which may shed new light on the development of dictionaries.