Genre-specıfıc semantıc prosody: the case of pose

Abstract

This study tries to deal with the semantic prosody of the word pose. The term semantic prosody refers to the fact that lexical items, by nature, tend to occur with positive, negative, or neutral collocations. For example the word cause has a negative semantic prosody (Stubbs, 1995) as it frequently collocates with words such as damage, problem, or pain. In this study, to see whether the target word pose has such a tendency, it was processed in a 464-million-word corpus (Davies, 2008) which is made up of five different genres namely: spoken language, fiction, magazines, newspapers, and academic journals. Collocational variety of pose in academic contexts was compared with the other genres mentioned. The results suggested that it actually has a negative semantic prosody in academic contexts, while in other contexts it tends to collocate mostly with neutral lexical items.