A New Approach To Semantic Prosody Analysis

Semantic prosody has been an important term in corpus linguistics.Current method for semantic prosody analysis is dominated by collocational analysis method.However,collocational method cannot provide sufficient and reliable information for the semantic prosody analysis of ALLEVIATE words,whose significant collocates are negative while the whole unit tends to be positive.This study adopts Lexeme-based collexeme analysis(LBCA)in semantic prosody analysis.It starts with a lexeme and examines interactions between the lexeme and its collexemes in different slots of the collostructions in which the lexeme typically occurs.By looking into the semantic prosody of its different collostruction clusters obtained by DepCluster and comparing the distribution of different semantic prosody tendency,a final judgment can be made about the semantic prosody of this target-lexeme centered context.Case studies with ALLEVIATE,HEAL and RELIEVE show that by providing more information sources,LBCA can solve the semantic prosody problems with ALLEVIATE words.In addition,the usefulness and reliability of those information sources in Inner Dependencies(I-Deps)and Outer Dependencies(O-Deps)are also discussed.It is found that nsubj slot,agent slot,advmod slot and advcl slot in I-Deps are useful,and ccomp,conj_and,conj_or,xcomp,vmod,advcl and rcmod slot in O-Deps are useful.The reliability of nsubj slot,agent slot,advmod slot in I-Deps and rcmod slot in O-Deps is related to the evaluative meanings of their collexemes.If they are clear,then the information provided in those slots will be reliable;otherwise not.The reliability of advcl slot varies with different types.Adverbial clause of concession is not reliable,temporal clause can be reliable,conditional clause,purpose clause and adverbial clause of reason are usually reliable.Ccomp slot,conj_and slot,conj_or slot,xcomp slot and vmod slot in O-Deps are reliable most of the time.