JB[v.20020404] Prn:5/08/2005; 14:42 F: IJC10301.tex / p.

1 (45-109)

A critique of the concept of semantic prosody

Sam Whitsitt
Università di Bologna a Forlì, Italy

The concept of semantic prosody was introduced to the public by Bill Louw
in 1993, and has become one of the more important concepts in corpus
linguistics. However, while other concepts such as collocation, colligation and
semantic preference are relatively unproblematic, one cannot say the same for
semantic prosody. At present, it is defined in at least three, distinctly different
ways, and more significantly, these differences remain largely undiscussed.
This article offers a detailed analysis of Louw’s concept of semantic prosody
(in Sections 1 through 3), and hopes to demonstrate that the concept and the
arguments for it are unconvincing. Concluding the article (Sections 4 and 5)
is a brief reflection on the paradox created by Louw’s use of metaphor in his
definition of semantic prosody.

Keywords: collocation, connotation, corpus linguistics, metaphor, priming,

semantic prosody

. Introduction

Corpus linguistics is a relatively new field of inquiry. It is not surprising, then,

that some of its concepts are still in flux. Such is the case with semantic prosody.
At present, it is defined in at least three, distinctly different ways. One is Bill
Louw’s, the first to be published, which came out in 1993 in his well-known
article, “Irony in the Text or Insincerity in the Writer?: The Diagnostic Potential
of Semantic Prosody.” Then there is that of John Sinclair, who had originally
suggested the concept to Louw, and a third which has no definite author, but is
perhaps the most common. While it may not be unusual to have three different
definitions for the same concept, what can be confusing is that the latter two,
while differing from Louw and from each other, still claim to be working within
Louw’s original definition. Moreover, even though Louw himself has called for

International Journal of Corpus Linguistics : (), ‒.

 ‒ ⁄ - ‒ © John Benjamins Publishing Company
 JB[v.20020404] Prn:5/08/2005; 14:42 F: IJC10301.tex / p.2 (109-163)

 Sam Whitsitt

a “revised working definition of the term” (2000: 49), he offers no critique of

his first definition, and no clear alternatives.
We will take a moment to discuss these differences, but to do so requires
that we have a clear idea about what is central to Louw’s first definition,1 which
can be put as follows: if several different words all sharing the same semantic
trait are frequently used with another word, meaning will be passed, over time,
from that group of words to the other word. Or, to put it another way, the key
idea is that constant proximity between words can lead to promiscuity wherein
the meaning of one word or words will be “rubbed off ” onto another, as Ge-
offrey Leech put it (in Bublitz 1996: 11).2 It is this idea, fundamental to Louw’s
concept of semantic prosody, that is missing in the other two definitions.
John Sinclair’s definition of semantic prosody, in his 1996 article, “The
Search for Units of Meaning,” goes as follows:
semantic prosody. . .is attitudinal, and on the pragmatic side of the seman-
tics / pragmatics continuum. It is thus capable of a wide range of realisation,
because in pragmatic expressions the normal semantic values of the words are
not necessarily relevant. But once noticed among the variety of expression, it
is immediately clear that the semantic prosody has a leading role to play in the
integration of an item with its surroundings. (Sinclair 1996a: 87)3

By emphasizing the pragmatic function of what semantic prosody might be,

the importance of the semantic dimension as well as the idea of semantic trans-
fer is dramatically reduced,4 and it seems more than justified to raise the ques-
tion of why one would continue to use the term? This seems to have been what
Michael Stubbs thought. After several years of carefully developing Louw’s first
definition,5 Stubbs now seems to have abandoned both the concept and term
itself. He prefers to use the term, discourse prosody, and his reasoning goes
as follows:
Discourse prosodies express speaker attitude. . . Since they are evaluative,
prosodies often express the speaker’s reason for making the utterance, and
therefore identify functional discourse items. . . Several studies use the term
‘semantic prosodies’ (Louw 1993; Sinclair 1996). ‘Pragmatic prosodies’ might
be a better term, since this would maintain a standard distinction between as-
pects of meaning which are independent of speakers (semantics) and aspects
which concern speaker attitude (pragmatics). I will here prefer the term ‘dis-
course prosodies’, both in order to maintain the relation to speakers and hear-
ers, but also to emphasize their function in creating discourse coherence. . .
(Stubbs 2001: 65–66)
JB[v.20020404] Prn:5/08/2005; 14:42 F: IJC10301.tex / p.3 (163-211)

A critique of the concept of semantic prosody 

While Stubbs is very close to Sinclair’s position, he apparently feels it is nec-

essary to change terminology since he finds the term, semantic prosody, no
longer accurate for what he is describing. What Stubbs does not do, however, is
offer a critique of the concept of semantic prosody; the term simply drops out
of his discourse where for some time it had a certain currency.
The third definition, which is very widespread, treats semantic prosody
as if it were a synonym of connotation. Alan Partington writes that seman-
tic prosody is “an aspect of expressive connotation” (1998: 66).6 Janet Cotterill
writes, in citing Stubbs’ work in Text and Corpus Analysis (1996), that semantic
prosody is involved in “revealing ‘words [which] occur in characteristic collo-
cations, showing the associations and connotations they have and therefore the
assumptions which they embody”’ (Cotterill 2001: 291). More examples could
easily be cited, which is no doubt what prompted Louw to recently say that we
“need to make it plain that semantic prosodies are not merely connotational”
(2000: 50). Making the difference plain between the two terms, however, does
not seem easy. We can see this in Partington’s comments on a concordance of
the verb commit, which is intended to demonstrate semantic prosody. He writes
that an “unfavourable connotation can be seen to reside not simply in the word
commit but over a unit consisting of commit and its collocates” (1998: 67). On
the one hand, he alludes to what would be an important difference between
connotation and semantic prosody, which concerns where meaning is located.
Connotation (which is linked to denotation), would locate meaning within a
word, while semantic prosody would locate meaning as “spread[ing] across”
words (Partington 1998: 68).7 On the other hand, Partington seems to dimin-
ish that difference to the extent that he implies that the term “connotation” can
nonetheless be enlisted as a defining term of semantic prosody since conno-
tation can also “reside. . .[spread] over” two or more words.8 Using the terms
in this manner makes them both lose a certain semantic specificity. Semantic
prosody is simply connotation spread over several words, and connotation is
semantic prosody that no longer shows how the process of semantic transfer
takes place.
Louw’s more recent comments on semantic prosody do not seem helpful.
In a talk in 2000 he takes up the issue of, “A working definition of semantic
prosodies” (2000: 58). When he mentions what would be the specific defining
trait of semantic prosody, which is the idea of semantic transfer, or the idea that
meaning can “rub off ” on another word, his reference is, however, oblique
and muted, as can be seen in the following comment: “A semantic prosody
refers to a form of meaning which is established through the proximity of a
 JB[v.20020404] Prn:5/08/2005; 14:42 F: IJC10301.tex / p.4 (211-255)

 Sam Whitsitt

consistent series of collocates, often characterisable as positive or negative. . .”

(2000: 50). Moreover, this is the only time he refers to the idea of semantic
transfer, which should be the idea which best defines what semantic prosody
refers to, and which would be the idea that best distinguishes it from a concept
like connotation.
That Louw himself does not insist on this difference may account for why
he seems unable to offer any convincing argument demonstrating the differ-
ence between semantic prosody and connotation. When he asks us, “[S]uppose
we were to ask the average reader what the connotations of the phrasal verb
build + up are? Is that reader likely to reply with the question: ‘Transitive or
intransitive?’ Is connotation ever subjected to this type of rigorous precon-
dition?” (2000: 50), it should not be surprising if the reader is unable to un-
derstand why one wouldn’t or couldn’t subject connotation to those ques-
tions. And when he suggests that “connotation [is] too loosely intuitive ever
to prompt [that] sort of question. . .” (2000: 50), there is simply nothing inher-
ent in the definition of connotation that makes it “too loosely intuitive.” Other
distinctions that Louw goes on to make also seem to confuse the issue even
more, as when he suggests that semantic prosody is related more to “what lit-
erary critics call authorial tone” (2000: 50), which is precisely how connotation
has often been described.
The fact that the term, “semantic prosody,” frequently finds itself in the
company of “connotation” indicates that both terms, in drifting towards each
other, have drifted away from certain specific defining traits. If for no other rea-
son than to keep these terms clear, we need to now turn to look in more detail
at how Louw, in his 1993 article, “Irony in the Text or Insincerity in the Writer?:
The Diagnostic Potential of Semantic Prosodies,” sets forth his arguments for
one of these terms: semantic prosody.

. An analysis of Louw’s definition of semantic prosody

Bill Louw was the first to publish an article on semantic prosody, but he credits
John Sinclair with having provided him with both the idea and the term itself
in a “personal communication” in 1988 (Louw 1993: 158). In his article, Louw
tells us that Sinclair coined the term when he was trying to explain a particular
kind of lexical pattern he had observed. That pattern can be found in Sinclair’s
book Looking Up (1987: 150–159), a pattern Louw calls “the first computation-
ally derived ‘profile’ to appear in print of the phenomenon which Sinclair has
JB[v.20020404] Prn:5/08/2005; 14:42 F: IJC10301.tex / p.5 (255-302)

A critique of the concept of semantic prosody 

begun to refer to as a ‘semantic prosody”’ (Louw 1993: 158). This “profile”

is of the intransitive verb, set in (others, like happen, were also examined by
Sinclair), and is by now a classic in corpus linguistics.
What Sinclair noted when he asked his corpus to produce the collocations
of the intransitive verb, set in, was that what appeared to the immediate left of
the verb were words which prevalently “‘refer to unpleasant states of affairs”’
(in Louw 1993: 158), words like decadence, disease, rot, rigor mortis, etc. There is
no doubt that this observation was significant. A phrasal verb, whose meaning
and use was apparently familiar to all, was revealing things about itself that had
not been known before. Moreover, these revelations were being made possible
by new technologies which allowed language to be observed as it was actually
used, and to appear as if it were raw data. Certainly this attests to the fact that
computer technology, constructing corpora, and concordance programs are of
inestimable value in our study of language, allowing us to look at and think
about language in new and different ways. What is not yet clear is whether
what is revealed by the patterns of a verb like, set in, warrants being called “new
facts about language” (1993: 173), which is what Louw claims. Since whatever is
“new” about language can only be something “used,” as it were, the new is not
a simple thing to identify. What the concept of semantic prosody proposes as
new are two things: 1) it would provide a demonstration of how a new princi-
ple of language – Sinclair’s idiom principle – works. That is, it would allow the
observer to witness, almost, how meaning and expression can actually “fuse”
(Sinclair 1996b: 115). And 2), it shows what this fusion produces: a new lexical
item, like the verb set in, which has acquired a negative meaning which it had
not had, through a process of semantic transfer about which we had been un-
aware, and resulting in the fact that this new item must almost always appear
“now” only with other unpleasant words.
The claims that Louw makes for semantic prosody are, then, considerable.
But before finally turning to examine these claims in detail, one more comment
must be made regarding the evidence for semantic prosody. On the one hand,
one could make the claim that there are valid grounds for dismissing semantic
prosody from the outset as a concept worthy of study. The argument would
go as follows: what semantic prosody accounts for is a phenomenon, which
due to new technology, can be empirically observed. The data that is observed
is presented in a corpus which is organized synchronically. The essence of the
phenomenon of semantic prosody is, however, historical change: meaning be-
ing transferred between terms which appear together frequently over time. The
question would then be: can the process of diachronic change be derived from
 JB[v.20020404] Prn:5/08/2005; 14:42 F: IJC10301.tex / p.6 (302-367)

 Sam Whitsitt

the observations made of a synchronically organized corpus? The answer is no,

and therefore the concept should be dismissed.
There is an alternative. One could take the position that the concept of se-
mantic prosody can still be argued for, even if one must grant that there is no
empirical evidence supporting it. After all, it must also be granted that there is
no empirical evidence demonstrating the contrary. What this should then leave
us with is the question of which arguments are the most convincing. But this
is not quite the case. On the one hand, the corpus linguist is well aware of the
problem of deriving evidence of historical change from a synchronic corpus.
In his article, “The Empty Lexicon” (1996b), Sinclair writes: “In a synchronic
view of language, the origins of meaning are not under scrutiny” (1996b: 113),
and that they are not, it can be added, is not because the observer simply de-
cided not to, but because they cannot be observed from a synchronic corpus.9
On the other hand, in the very next line, Sinclair’s writes: “But some of the
processes of change are inescapably obvious” (1996b: 113). One could say that
semantic prosody is the concept that would account for those “processes of
change” which are “inescapably obvious,” even when examining a synchroni-
cally organized corpus. Which is to say, while we will now turn to examine the
arguments Louw makes for semantic prosody, the question of the empirical,
the idea of the “inescapably obvious,” cannot be avoided and will have to be
addressed.
Louw employs three analogies in his argument for semantic prosody, and
we will examine all three. We find the first analogy in the definition of semantic
prosody which Louw gives in the abstract of his 1993 article: “A consistent aura
of meaning with which a form is imbued by its collocates is referred to. . .as
a semantic prosody” (1993: 157). As has been noted above, semantic prosody
is concerned with meaning being transferred from one word to another. Here,
this transfer is described by Louw with a metaphor, the trope itself of transport,
which is: to imbue. There is another metaphor at work in the definition – that
meaning is thought of as an aura – but our attention will be on the former.10
The use Louw makes of imbue is that of the classical four-term metaphor, which
can be simply expressed as follows: collocates stand to form as an imbuer stands
to what gets imbued. But in order to better understand these terms and how
they are linked, we need to understand what the word imbue means and how
it is used. In the Oxford English Dictionary we find “imbue” as a transitive
verb with a literal and figurative meaning. The literal sense is linked with flu-
ids: when one imbues something, it means: “to saturate, wet thoroughly (with
moisture); to dye, to tinge, impregnate (with colour. . .).” The figurative mean-
JB[v.20020404] Prn:5/08/2005; 14:42 F: IJC10301.tex / p.7 (367-412)

A critique of the concept of semantic prosody 

ing refers to immaterial principles, such as spirit, moral vigor, beliefs, as in

“to impregnate, permeate, pervade, or inspire (with opinions, feelings, habits,
etc.).” What seems to be happening here is that immaterial things such as spirit,
meanings, and beliefs can be transferred by imbuing because they are thought
of as liquids. The analogue of the immaterial is the material dimension of liq-
uids. If Grace Divine can imbue one’s words with grace, as we read in one of the
OED’s examples from Milton (“Thy words with Grace Divine imbu’d”), that is
because the signified, grace, is like a liquid which permeates the material signi-
fiers, or words. If we check how imbue and imbued are used in the BNC, what
we find in the OED is confirmed with examples such as, “one effective way
in which Reynolds could imbue his firm with team spirit,” and, “mud walls,
thatched roof and rude furniture; but it was imbued by those two remarkable
and lovable people with a. . .” If we now return to Louw’s four-term metaphor,
we could say that just like God imbues, or saturates words with his spirit, or
just like Reynolds fills or pours team spirit into his firm, collocates imbue, or
pour their meaning into a form which is assumed to be empty. And that is how
a term like set in came to have a negative connotation.
The reader is being asked to accept much: the idea that some words can
act like God, or like an enthused employer in the BNC example above, and that
meaning is like a liquid (which was, however, one of most pervasive and endur-
ing metaphors of Romanticism, a consideration which is not without interest
when one inquires into what the major metaphors underpinning corpus lin-
guistics are, and how often meaning is spoken of in terms of fluids and flows).
But these are not the central problem with this analogy. The main problem is
that it assumes without explaining why that there are some words which are
full and others empty, and that when a full word is next to an empty word,
it seems unable to not “pour” its meaning into the empty, “innocent” one
(Sinclair 1994: 21), which in turn seems unable to refuse.
As if in recognition of the difficulty of this argument, Louw employs an-
other analogy which goes as follows: that collocates stand to the word which
will be imbued as content stands to form. What initially suggests that Louw is
using this analogy is the fact that he uses the word, “form,” in his definition:
“A consistent aura of meaning with which a form is imbued by its collocates”
(1993: 157). What he does not use is the word, “content.” The argument here,
however, is that if he uses “form,” we can be sure that “content” is likewise
‘there,’ at work in his argument, which means that when he refers to “collo-
cates,” he is actually thinking “content.” That this is the case is reinforced by
the fact that Louw’s use of the term, “collocates” (1993: 159), has little to do
 JB[v.20020404] Prn:5/08/2005; 14:42 F: IJC10301.tex / p.8 (412-444)

 Sam Whitsitt

with how the term is normally understood. A collocate is one word or more
that frequently appears in the company of another word – like “naked eye” (to
cite but another example of Sinclair’s many investigations (1996a: 83–89)). Or,
to use Michael Hoey’s delightful characterization, a collocation is like a “young
man and woman of good reputation ‘keeping company”’ (1997: 4). What Hoey
seems to suggest by “good reputation” is not, to use Sinclair’s collocation of
“naked eye,” that “naked” is faithful only to “eye,” since both words certainly
have other collocations (“naked truth,” “eye socket”), but that when “naked”
frequents “eye,” when these same words collocate frequently, they become a
recognizable pair, their good reputation depends on the fact that nothing hap-
pens between them. They are good because no matter how close they frequently
are together, their frequent proximity never leads to promiscuity. Which is
why Sinclair can say of collocations that they are, “a frequent co-occurrence
of words,” which “does not have a profound effect on the individual meanings
of the words” (1996a: 80).
This is not the case with semantic prosody. The words that appear to the
immediate left of set in are rarely the same words; they change constantly
(which, if one wishes to stay in tune with Hoey’s analogy, means that semantic
prosody describes very loose behavior!). What is “habitual” is not the repeti-
tion of the same word, or the same form, or the same material signifier – which
is what happens with collocates and is what makes collocates possible – but
rather, the repetition of what Louw interprets as being the same immaterial
signified, or meaning, or content. What emerges from this is that the collocates
are being thought of as content without form, while the term to be imbued is
form without content. That the form to be imbued is thought of as virtually
empty is not simply because the pair, “form / content,” implies that form is
empty and content is what fills the empty form, but also because Louw refers
to this form as something which can be a “catch-all word” (1993: 161), or a
form which, because it is empty, can “catch all” the meaning poured into it by
the collocations’ content.11
It is easy to see how the analogy of form and content functions in try-
ing to effect the passage of meaning from one word to another: if one word is
content, with no form, and the other word is form with no content, and they
frequently appear always right next to one another, then “content / meaning”
passing into “form / empty word” would appear to be a kind of foregone con-
clusion, something which occurred in an entirely natural way – a natural law
being fulfilled with filling a vacuum. And this would be the empiricist’s dream
come true where facts would seem to speak for themselves. This would be the
JB[v.20020404] Prn:5/08/2005; 14:42 F: IJC10301.tex / p.9 (444-505)

A critique of the concept of semantic prosody 

moment when one could witness how “Repeated usage actually fuses the sense
and the expression,” as Sinclair puts it (1996b: 115) (emp. the author’s).
When we shift from the analogy to language itself, however, the seman-
tic prosodist is still faced with the problem of having to demonstrate on what
grounds it can be claimed that a verb like set in is an empty form, or that just be-
cause one full term is constantly right next to an empty one, there must appar-
ently be a “spillover of meaning” (Sinclair 1996b: 115). Louw’s third analogy,
to which we will now turn, in spite of being grounded in the facts of phonetics,
does not seem to offer much help. After noting that Sinclair used the term of se-
mantic prosody in the Firthian sense of prosody, which referred to “phonolog-
ical colouring which was capable of transcending [the] segmental boundaries
[of words]” (1993: 158), Louw argues that just as there can be sound “colour-
ing” between letters, there can be a semantic “colouring” between words:
The nasal prosody in the word Amen would be an example: we find that the
vowels are imbued with a nasal quality because of their proximity to the nasals
m and n. In the same way, the habitual collocates of the form set in are capa-
ble of colouring it, so it can no longer be seen in isolation from its semantic
prosody, which is established through the semantic consistency of its subjects.
(Louw 1993: 158–159)

This analogy argues that in the word Amen, nasal-sounding consonants stand
to the vowels like unpleasant words stand to a verb, like set in.12 Or more specif-
ically, the analogy argues that just as the nasal consonants in Amen will colour
the vowels with a nasal sound, so will the “habitual collocates” of a verb like
set in, colour that verb with a negative meaning. One can easily see that as long
as the vowels appear in the word, Amen, they will surely be imbued by a nasal
sound. But what happens when these same vowels appear with other conso-
nants which do not have a nasal sound? Will the vowels still be coloured by a
nasal sound? Or will the vowels, once they have been coloured by nasal sounds,
only appear with nasal sounding consonants? Clearly the answer to both these
questions is no. The vowels do not get permanently coloured with a nasal
sound. This, however, is precisely what Louw claims for semantic prosody. He
claims that once the verb set in gets coloured with a negative meaning, it will
not only always have that colour, but it will tend to only appear with words
which have negative meanings, or be the word which “colours” other words
with negative, bad semantic prosody. The analogy on which this argument is
based, however, simply does not hold.
 JB[v.20020404] Prn:5/08/2005; 14:42 F: IJC10301.tex / p.10 (505-545)

 Sam Whitsitt

At this point, we need to return to what remains the critical point on which
the concept of semantic prosody rests – which is that the word-form to be im-
bued with meaning, is empty; or, to put it another way, let us return to the
story of semantic prosody, which is that of a word-form which is inexplicably
empty, or perhaps not so much empty as weak and innocent, and suddenly
finds itself (could be “herself ”) inexplicably thrown into a world of bad com-
pany, which is made up of unpleasant words which are, likewise inexplicably,
full of themselves, and cannot help themselves from pouring their negativity
into any empty form which is near them. In this world, proximity clearly leads
to promiscuity, but the flow is always one-way, from strong, full, bad words,
into the weak, empty, innocent forms, which are incapable of resisting the force
of bad company, to which they too will soon belong, and from which they can
never leave, ever again.
This is clearly a story, or an organizing myth, as old as it is tritely formulaic,
of the fall from innocence into a world of bad company.13 What is not clear,
perhaps, is its link to the question at hand. Such a story is, however, one of at
least two ways to explain why semantic prosody posits the idea of an empty
form, or of a word being innocent of meaning. Moreover, this is precisely the
kind of story which Sinclair predicted would be told if one tries to account for
the history of a word and its changes in meaning, by basing that account on
observations made from a synchronically designed corpus. As Sinclair notes,
the result is necessarily the construction of “a pseudo-historical notion” of a
“linguistic paradise” where at one time words were innocent, but then fell into
a world of “the brutal clash of usage,” which leaves them, as with semantic
prosody, forever imbued with negativity (1996b: 113).14
The idea that such a narrative structure might be behind a concept like
semantic prosody should not be dismissed too quickly, in spite of the fact that
there is another, perhaps more plausible explanation for why semantic prosody
posits the possibility of the empty form of a word. This second explanation
concerns both the methodology and ideology of corpus linguistics. What must
not be underestimated is the force and implications of the belief that with cor-
pus linguistics an “empirical renaissance” (Church 2001: 1) has taken place.
The force of this belief in Sinclair’s work is well illustrated in his article, “The
Empty Lexicon” (1996b). When a word or word pattern is selected for observa-
tion, it is methodologically imperative for the observer to suspend all meaning
or content concerning that which is being observed. As Sinclair states with re-
gard to the kind of dictionary which would result from observation, “The lexi-
con [derived from words or pattern of words observed] is considered empty at
JB[v.20020404] Prn:5/08/2005; 14:42 F: IJC10301.tex / p.11 (545-612)

A critique of the concept of semantic prosody 

the start because nothing appears in it except what is gleaned from the study
of the language in use – nowadays, through the study of corpora” (1996b: 114).
One could say, turning to semantic prosody, that Sinclair’s empty lexicon is
Louw’s empty form. In other words, what explains why Louw’s form is empty
is that it is simply the term under observation. As such, that term, according
to empirical methodology itself, has been emptied, or had its meaning and
content, suspended.
Presumably the idea would be that meaning is suspended as a heuristic ex-
ercise; that in order to see what is possible with a new technology which allows
what approximates the pure observation of language in use, one suspends as far
as possible those factors which might predetermine observation. This contin-
ues until one exhausts whatever possibilities this approach offers; and then one
turns away to consult other sources – including that which one had temporar-
ily suspended. With semantic prosody, however, something different seems to
happen. Which is that in Louw’s analysis, what should be, for the observer, a
methodological principle of suspending meaning, slides into becoming a kind
of ontological assumption regarding the word, that it is, in fact, empty.
There are a number of factors that contribute to making such a slip pos-
sible. Aside from a conviction that the new technologies of corpus linguistics
have made it possible to purely observe a purely empirical world, there is also
what seems to be the insistence that the problems corpus linguistics confronts
can be solved at the same level of awareness that “created” them.15 Such a view,
which is mistaken, makes it seem that Louw is simply too empirical.

. Intuition and semantic prosody

At the risk of appearing overly simplistic, the larger argument presented here
can be put as one discussing the difference between what it means to look a word
up, as compared to what it means to look a word over, or look at a word. Such a
description, nonetheless, coincides very well on an abstract level with Sinclair’s
division in “The Empty Lexicon” between the traditional Academicians who
look words up in their dictionaries, and the new, empiricist Thespians who
look at words in their concordances (1996b: 116–117). But to risk an even fur-
ther simplification, it could be said that the concept of semantic prosody was
made possible because of the refusal to look a word up. This refusal is of course
based on the methodological and ideological grounds of empiricism. But as we
have just noted, there are problems in attempting to explain itself and what it
 JB[v.20020404] Prn:5/08/2005; 14:42 F: IJC10301.tex / p.12 (612-634)

 Sam Whitsitt

observes when the empirical attempts to remain at the level of the empirical.
One consequence of being too empirical, is that there is the temptation to think
that if “given the chance,” corpus data will in fact, “speak for itself ” (Tognini-
Bonelli 2001: 17). And in trying to create the conditions for this to happen, the
semantic prosodist cannot appear to speak for that data, or rather, cannot an-
swer the question of why a word like set in happens to have the company it has,
or why it was used in the first place with those other words. If asked, the seman-
tic prosodist would most likely say that the empiricist is not interested in the
“why” of things, but with the “what” and “how.” But then the next question we
would be prompted to ask is why in the first place did the semantic prosodist
ever want to observe a word like set in? For the semantic prosodist, such a ques-
tion presents considerable difficulties, and the reason why he or she would do
everything to not answer this question is because the answer can hardly avoid
referring to the very mental faculty corpus linguists criticize most: intuition.
Yet it is surely something like intuition, those “unexplained feelings you have
that something is true even when you have no evidence or proof of it” (Collins
COBUILD English Dictionary for Advanced Learner’s 2001), that prompts one
to construct, in the first place, a concordance for a particular word (assuming,
of course, that the person running a concordance on a word is responding to
his or her own impulses). Moreover, it seems that intuition is not only at work
at the beginning of any inquiry, but is the very thing that makes a corpus possi-
ble, for it is surely the collection of people’s intuitive use of language that makes
it possible for a corpus to contain “real” language.
It is just as clear, however, that intuition is regarded by semantic prosody
as representing everything corpus linguistics is not. Louw even devised a test
to demonstrate how imperceptive our “intuitive perceptions” (1993: 173) are
regarding semantic prosody, which he provides in the conclusion to his 1993
article on semantic prosody. The test goes as follows: you are asked to write
down examples of how you think a term is used, and then asked to compare
what you wrote down with what is produced by a concordance for that same
term, which is supplied after you have completed your part of the test. It will
not be surprising that what you will have written down is paltry and “hum-
bling” (1993: 173) when compared to what the concordance produced. The
problem, however, is that this test has nothing to do with intuition. And the
reason for this seems clear: as soon as a person is asked to think about how a
word is used, and as soon as that person does indeed begin to think about it,
that person is no longer thinking intuitively. That person is suddenly thinking
in a highly conscious way about how he or she thinks they use language in an
JB[v.20020404] Prn:5/08/2005; 14:42 F: IJC10301.tex / p.13 (634-704)

A critique of the concept of semantic prosody 

intuitive way but are not doing so at that moment, and with a context – ‘think
about how a word is used’ – which is the least helpful in getting good results.
That intuition is being criticized with an example that misses intuition but
criticizes conscious thought is not as strange as it may seem. What is being
critiqued, in the name of the empirical, is thought itself – conscious or uncon-
scious. Thought, in the form of the “unexplained feelings” of intuition, or in
the form of conscious reason, or introspection, is in both cases turned away
from the real world. And what is being privileged is the pure observation of
that world. The distance, then, that the semantic prosodist tries to put between
intuition and corpus linguistics is also a distance, in the name of the empiri-
cal, that the semantic prosodist would put between any form of thought which
sullied the possibility of purely observing the factual world. And the one small
point that sullies this project is that question of why the semantic prosodist
ever decided in the first place to select a particular word for observation. One
can understand why it is not appreciated, and is avoided, because to answer it
would set off a kind of chain reaction of implications which would directly lead
to undermining the entire empirical project, as well as the idea that a word –
the word under observation – is empty. That sequence would go as follows:
to answer the question about why the semantic prosodist decided to make a
concordance for a particular word or phrase would be to acknowledge the role
of intuition, which would then acknowledge that there was something about
a word, or better, in a word, which would then mean that the word was not
empty. But as soon as this is granted, semantic prosody is no longer a feasible
concept. Semantic prosody depends on the idea, to paraphrase Sinclair, that
‘The flow of meaning is not from the word-form to the collocates but from the
collocates to the word-form.’16 And this is a one-way flow, which is made pos-
sible by the word-form being empty. But as soon as one grants that the word
is, if not full, then at least not empty – or is at least as “full” as its collocates –
then the very possibility for semantic prosody is undermined. If set in were no
longer thought of as an empty word-form, but as having meaning already, then
it would not be so simple to claim that meaning flows from winter to set in;
moreover, it would be as plausible to think that meaning flows in the opposite
direction, from set in to winter. Or more significantly, if words were already
equally ‘filled,’ as it were, one would have to begin to question the very aptness
of the metaphorics of liquids and flows, and begin to ask whether terms like
“full” and “empty,” are useful any longer, for if both terms are equally “full,”
then flow and the very metaphors of flow start to be turned off, shut down.
 JB[v.20020404] Prn:5/08/2005; 14:42 F: IJC10301.tex / p.14 (704-743)

 Sam Whitsitt

If the empiricist were to acknowledge the significance of intuition, that it

was intuition which led one in the first place to decide to look at a word, it
would not be difficult to grant the importance of looking up a word, which
is what we need to do before we leave this topic of what it implies if we be-
gin to think of a word as not being empty. So if we do, finally, look up a word
like, set in, and granted in the Oxford English Dictionary,17 what we find is
that already in the year 1700, “The weather was set in to an absolute thaw and
raine,” and in 1769, we have, “When the western monsoons set in.” Which is to
say that we have examples of the word being used in the company of unpleas-
ant words and things, but over 300 years ago. This would suggest that rather
than thinking that the verb did not have a negative meaning at one point, and
was in a sense, empty, but then acquired an unpleasant meaning through a
history of appearing with many negative words, it would be more plausible
to think that those negative connotations, or the possibility for such connota-
tions, were always already there, “in” the verb, to begin with.18 Moreover, if the
word already has within its family of meanings that sense of tenaciously root-
ing in, it would explain why the word was used in the first place with clearly
negative words, like rot. And the same argument can be made for the word,
cause, another well-known example of what should have demonstrated seman-
tic prosody: that contrary to being slowly filled over time with negativity so
that by now it can almost only be used with negative connotations, it always al-
ready had the possibility of being used with unpleasant words, as well as neutral
ones.19

. Hoey’s Priming – or, the question of semantics in a prosody of:

It sounds right20

Louw’s arguments for semantic prosody are based on metaphors which are not
convincing, analogies which do not hold up, and no empirical evidence.21 He
claims that his conclusions are based on “direct observation” (1993: 173) of
empirical data, but no matter how long one looks at what is the synchronic
use of a word like set in, there is no evidence for assuming that we can see the
results of a diachronic process of imbuing. And more particularly, there seems
to be no justification to continue using the metaphors of flows and liquids to
describe a movement of meaning. The contrary, in fact, seems to be the case.
One need but consider verbs like alleviate, heal, relieve, soothe, etc., all perfect
candidates for semantic prosody since they all habitually appear in the com-
JB[v.20020404] Prn:5/08/2005; 14:42 F: IJC10301.tex / p.15 (743-783)

A critique of the concept of semantic prosody 

pany of clearly unpleasant words, yet it seems clear that a word like alleviate,
to take one example, certainly does not come to have an unpleasant meaning
because of that company. Or let us consider another perfect candidate: commit.
Because it frequently appears with collocates like “offences, serious crime, foul,
etc” (Partington 1998: 67), it should also be so heavily traced by a negative se-
mantic prosody that it can no longer be used “in a favourable environment”
(Partington 1998: 67). But if one excerpts the phrase. “. . .she did not commit,”
from one of the concordance lines in which it appears, one cannot determine
or predict from that phrase, in the first instance, what commit means or will
mean; and more significantly, one cannot predict, on the basis of any seman-
tic dimension of the word, what words will follow. To be more precise, one
can predict with great accuracy what kinds of words frequently follow com-
mit, but that knowledge is not derived from knowing what commit means; we
cannot say that the reason we can predict the likelihood that an unpleasant
word will follow commit is because that word commit has been imbued or filled
with unpleasantness by negative words and therefore has a semantic aspect of
negativity.
Of course our knowledge of what might appear after commit is increased
enormously when we but add, for example, the indefinite article, as in “she
did not commit a.” With this addition, we could be very sure that what would
follow would be something linked to the world of crime. Moreover, we would
even be expecting some word from that domain once we heard the indefinite
article, a, following the verb, commit. That we do expect, however, that we do
think we know what is coming next, that we do think we know what will sound
right, or sound good, indicates that while it might be a question of sound, which
leaves us near prosody, it no longer has something to do with semantics. The
term semantic prosody is most typically used in a phrase like, ‘the word commit,
because of its negative semantic prosody, leads you to expect that an unpleas-
ant word will come next.’ The point here is that while we might expect, when
we hear the word commit, that a negative word will follow, that expectation is
not based on any semantic link between the two words. There may well be a
semantic explanation for why commit appears with murder, or himself, but the
expectation a reader has for what comes next is not based on those explanations.
This may be why Michael Hoey calls the collocational principle, in his arti-
cle, “Lexical Priming and the Properties of Text” (2003), “subversive” (2003: 1).
If a word like murder were to follow commit, yielding the phrase, she did not
commit murder, it is not a question of then knowing what the meaning of com-
mit is because of the use of the word murder. Instead, what we do have is a
 JB[v.20020404] Prn:5/08/2005; 14:42 F: IJC10301.tex / p.16 (783-835)

 Sam Whitsitt

recognizable collocational pair which, precisely because it is a recognized, col-

locational pair, is functioning according to a process which is not, as Hoey
suggests, linked in the first instance to semantics. Having murder follow com-
mit meets our expectations – our having been primed (to use Hoey’s metaphor
perhaps inappropriately as referring to people) to expect that sequence. But
priming, which is our knowledge that a word “co-occurs with other words”
(Hoey 2003: 1), is not, in the first instance, a semantic question (Hoey 2003: 4).
Louw’s argument is based on an attempt to demonstrate that expectation
is based on semantics, and that he can show why that is the case by showing
how meaning flows from one group of words to another, creating a kind of
bond between a field of meaning and a word. Hoey suggests an alternative, and
he does so with a change in metaphors. As is known, a change in metaphors
can indicate a shift in paradigms of thought,22 and Hoey’s introduction of the
metaphor of “priming” does offer an alternative to the metaphors of fluids and
flows which Louw uses. Although “priming” can certainly be linked to liquids,
as in priming a pump, it seems that Hoey might be thinking more in terms of
priming something which has been, as he puts it, “loaded” (2003: 1). This of
course allows for thinking of meanings as being “triggered,” “fired,” “misfired,”
“back-fired,” etc., all terms which Hoey does not actually use, but which the
term “primed” is primed to fire, as it were. What is being loaded and fired is
of course intriguing – muzzle-loaders or something analogous to nerve ganglia
and synapses – but we cannot, unfortunately, enter here into all the implica-
tions of what this shift in metaphors promises.23 What needs to be stressed,
however, is the very significant point Hoey makes that our expectations, which
may even explain why we have collocations, is not sustained by linguistic or se-
mantic principles, in spite of the fact that in some cases, there are surely seman-
tic grounds for what becomes a collocation, just as there are grounds such as, it
sounds good, which likewise leads to collocations, or other repeatable patterns.

. The principle of metaphor and the idiom principle

Studying how semantic prosody is constructed as a concept provides us with

a fascinating example of how the linguist uses language to talk about lan-
guage. As we have seen, Louw’s definition of semantic prosody is itself based
on metaphor. And metaphor, or the principle of metaphor, is perhaps the best
example of what Sinclair would call the “open-choice” principle (1991: 109–
110), according to which individual words are seen as independent, individual
JB[v.20020404] Prn:5/08/2005; 14:42 F: IJC10301.tex / p.17 (835-875)

A critique of the concept of semantic prosody 

units, and not bound in chunks of language. This is similar to the principle of
metaphor which argues that any word can be taken out of what might be con-
sidered its ‘normal’ semantic field, and used in a field that does not belong to it,
or in which it is improper, as Aristotle put it.24 Corpus linguistics, however, and
Louw’s arguments for semantic prosody in particular, is dedicated to demon-
strating that language is not based on the open-choice principle, but on the
“idiom principle” (Sinclair 1991: 110), which is the idea that words bond with
each other, and “tend to go together” (Sinclair 1996a: 82). What this results in is
the ironic situation that metaphor, an expression of the open choice principle,
is used to define semantic prosody, an expression of the idiom principle, which
in principle and perhaps in fact, excludes metaphor from what it defines as typ-
ical language.25 The language used to define what constitutes typical language
gets excluded from what it defines as typical language.
While it is clear from the outset to the reader of Louw’s text that he is us-
ing metaphors, Louw himself makes no mention of it until the conclusion of
his article, where he writes: “One even finds that the assistance of metaphor
can be enlisted both to prepare us for the advent of a semantic prosody and to
maintain its intensity once it has appeared” (1993: 173). On the one hand, what
Louw says of metaphor is characteristically dismissive: it can be useful, but is
hardly essential; of assistance, but not necessary; an embellishment at worst, an
aid at best, but not constitutive; not fundamental. On the other hand, to write
that metaphor can both prepare us for the “advent of a semantic prosody,” and
then “maintain” the “intensity” of semantic prosody “once it has appeared,”
can certainly be read as giving metaphor considerable power. Moreover, there
is, after all, a similarity between semantic prosody and metaphor. Both are
concerned with “transporting” meaning across a gap between apparently dis-
similar domains. Semantic prosody, however, wants to literalize metaphor; it
wants to actually imbue another term, to actually pour meaning from one word
into another, which is to say, semantic prosody, in proving itself, would also
demonstrate the end of metaphor.
At this point one might well ask whether Louw is being ironic, or even
insincere. It does seem, after all, that he is saying one thing about language with
language which says the opposite. And we of course need to recall that Louw
introduces the concept of semantic prosody as a way of discovering, as his title
says, “Irony in the Text or Insincerity in the Writer.” What indicates in a text
the possible presence of either or both is what Louw calls a “collocative clash”
(1993: 157) which occurs when there are “departures in speech and writing
from the expected profiles” of a word’s collocational pattern (1993: 157). The
 JB[v.20020404] Prn:5/08/2005; 14:42 F: IJC10301.tex / p.18 (875-960)

 Sam Whitsitt

idea of a collocational clash, however, is hardly restricted to irony or authorial

insincerity; metaphor by definition will have a collocational clash. And it seems
clear that a word like imbue clashes with its “collocates” in Louw’s definition.
But the fact that Louw uses a metaphor in his definition could contribute to
the idea that he is being insincere, and / or ironic since, as we have noted, what
could be more insincere or ironic than defining a concept with terms which
both call into question and are excluded by the same concept they define?

. Conclusion

[V]owels are imbued with a nasal quality because of their proximity to the
nasals m and n. In the same way, the habitual collocates of the form set in are
capable of colouring it. . . (1993: 158)
Bill Louw, in “Irony in the Text or Insincerity in the Writer?: The Diagnostic
Potential of Semantic Prosodies.”

Partridge likewise shovelled in his share of calumny, and (what may surprise
the reader) not only bespattered the maid, but attempted to sully the lily-white
character of Sophia herself. ‘Never a barrel the better herring,’ cries he, ‘Nosc-
itur a socio’ is a true saying.”
From Tom Jones, by Henry Fielding (1996 [1749]: 469)

That semantic prosody is defined through metaphor is ironic. This irony, how-
ever, is not limited only to the case of semantic prosody. The same observations
we have made about Louw’s definition can be made about Firth’s statement,
“you shall know a word by the company it keeps” (Firth 1957: 179). This state-
ment is often taken as founding corpus linguistics itself; it is a statement which
supports the idea of the idiom principle. But Firth’s statement relies on an anal-
ogy, which is that a word is like a person, which then allows the term “word”
to substitute metaphorically for “person.” This particular usage is unusual. If
we check in the BNC, the pattern of a “word” in the company of “company”
and “keep” occurs only twice, and it is not surprising that one of the instances
is the statement, “you can know a word by the company it keeps.”26 What is
surprising about this statement, however, which has always been considered
an offspring of Firth’s truly fertile mind, is that it does not claim Firth as its
father. What we are given is a citation claiming that the statement belongs to
Henry Fielding, the 18th-century English novelist. The reference is to be found
in a book, Learning the Law, published in 1982 (London, by Stevens and Sons),
by a writer named, G. Williams, who claims that it was Fielding who took the
JB[v.20020404] Prn:5/08/2005; 14:42 F: IJC10301.tex / p.19 (960-963)

A critique of the concept of semantic prosody 

Roman phrase, Noscitur a sociis, or “you can know a person by the company
he keeps,” and coined the phrase, “a word may be known by the company it
keeps.” This assertion, however, is not easy to verify. In Fielding’s works there
does not seem to be a perfect match for the phrase, “you can know a word by
the company it keeps.” Nonetheless, in Fielding’s Tom Jones one does find at
least two references to the Latin expression, noscitur a sociis, with the accom-
panying translation, that “you can know a person by the company he keeps”
(Fielding 1996 [1749]: 104, 469). More importantly, however, is the point that
anyone who reads Tom Jones cannot help but perceive, from the very outset,
that the entire novel is dedicated to demonstrating, on the one hand, how
snobbish, priggish, mean, base, unjust and false that very saying is, and how,
on the other hand, you cannot, in fact, know a person or word by the company
“it” keeps precisely because of the principle of metaphor, which is privileged
throughout the text and strongly represented in the idea of the foundling, Tom
Jones himself, who is never found in his proper semantic field, as it were. Re-
gardless of whether Fielding coined the phrase, that “you can (or shall) know
a word by the company it keeps,” he clearly shows how the “original” state-
ment reveals an anxiety about the status of the individual who is threatened by
the depersonalizing influence of the crowd, and class position. Moreover, it is
a statement which one would say about others, but would clearly not want to
be said about the one who says it. And that is because if you can be known by
the company you keep, you have little substance of your own, whereas if you
cannot, that is because you do have substance. The pragmatic function of the
statement would be to open up a gap between those who can be known by the
company they keep, and those who cannot. It would be a question of the indi-
vidual versus the amorphous mass with the individual clearly being privileged.
But with this understanding of what it means to say that one can be known by
the company he or she keeps, one cannot extend its meaning to language, with
an analogy, without considerable problems. For the analogy would then give
us the distinct, individual word versus the idea of the idiom principle, of words
fusing together into lexical items, but with the individual word clearly being
privileged over those words which fuse together. And that is certainly not how
Firth’s phrase is understood. Yet a tension is just as certainly there, and ought to
bring us to consider, in conclusion, the possible insincerity, the possible irony,
and the use of metaphor in the phrase, that we can know a word by the company
it keeps, all of which contradict the very idiom principle which that phrase is
supposed to uphold. And since what can be said about this phrase can also ap-
 JB[v.20020404] Prn:5/08/2005; 14:42 F: IJC10301.tex / p.20 (963-1022)

 Sam Whitsitt

ply to the concept of semantic prosody, it should give us pause in our use of
that term.

Notes

. Unless otherwise noted, when I discuss Louw’s definition of semantic prosody, I am

always referring to how he defined it in his 1993 article.
. This article develops the ideas I presented in a paper at the Second International Confer-
ence on Corpus Use and Learning to Translate, Bertinoro, Italy, 3–4 November 2000. The
paper was entitled: A Critique of Semantic Prosody: proximity, promiscuity, and prophylactics.
. Later definitions remain consistent with the one given here. See Sinclair’s “The Lexical
Item” (1999: 20).
. Perhaps a kind of semantic transfer is still hinted at in Sinclair’s definition when he
mentions the “integration of an item with its surroundings” (emp. the author’s).
. See Stubbs 1995a: 245–256 and 1995b: 23–55.
. Partington is clearly aware of the differences between semantic prosody and connota-
tion, but when he goes on to say that semantic prosody can also have an evaluative, func-
tional meaning, like Sinclair and Stubbs, as well as be involved in a semantic transfer, like
Louw, those differences begin to lose their distinctness. See Partington 1998: 65–78. See also
Hunston 2000: 20–21 and 2002: 141.
. The idea of meaning spreading across words draws on Sinclair’s idea of the idiom princi-
ple (1991: 110), as does the idea that meaning is not located “in” single words, but in “their
combinations” (Sinclair 1996a: 82)
. See Partington (1998: Chap. 4, Connotation and Semantic Prosody, pp. 65–69), for an
interesting and helpful commentary on these terms. See also Stubbs (2001: 34–35, 197–198).
. One might want to argue that once a diachronic corpus is established, it would be possible
to test the claims of semantic prosody. This remains very problematic, however. Even if one
can show that a word like set in is used more frequently today in the company of unpleasant
words than it was yesterday, this cannot be taken as proof that unpleasant meanings have
been transferred to set in.
. As we shall see, however, aura is a term circulating within the semantic field of imbue.
. Intentionally or not, the consequence of this fusion between content and form, or signi-
fied and signifier, is that Saussure’s principle of the arbitrariness of the sign is dismissed.
. One could well ask from the outset whether the analogy holds: is the relationship be-
tween vowels and consonants similar to that between words? It would seem that the in-
appropriateness of this analogy in particular would undo all claims of semantic prosody
inasmuch as it is difficult to argue that sound is traced by history.
. The company words fall into can be good, it simply seems curiously rare.
JB[v.20020404] Prn:5/08/2005; 14:42 F: IJC10301.tex / p.21 (1022-1077)

A critique of the concept of semantic prosody 

. This version is only a slight modification of Sinclair’s text, the main difference being that
Sinclair’s “pseudo-history” begins with words in a paradise where they are “tidily related” to
clearly single units of meaning, only to then fall into life which will leave them in the happy
clutches of idioms!
. A paraphrase of the statement attributed to Einstein, that ‘problems cannot be solved at
the same level of awareness that created them.’
. Sinclair’s text goes as follows: “The flow of meaning is not from the item to the text but
from the text to the item” (1999: 6). This line is describing “semantic reversal,” which seems
very close to the process and result of semantic prosody.
. The Oxford English Dictionary has that dimension which, as Raymond Williams noted,
is “primarily philological and etymological” (1988: 19).
. It is interesting to note that set in, as an intransitive verb, with humans as its subject,
often refers to war, but with the idea of helping the embattled, as in the definition from
the OED: “To make one’s way into the fight, among the enemy; hence, to offer fight, to
intervene in behalf of a person or in support of a cause.” Some of the examples are: from
1450, “Whan thei saugh the hoste comynge thei merveiled fro whens so moche peple myght
come. Neuertheles thei sette in a-monge hem.” From 1656: “It is our duty to set in for the
assistance of these,. . .to help them to a conquest of their corruptions.” Here set in would
have a positive sense, but in a negative situation – that of war. In both cases, however, what
remains the same is the sense of tenacity, of something that sticks it out to the end, even if
bitter, or even if the having stuck it out is what saves the day.
. See Stubbs (1995b: 50).
. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Dominic Stewart for the many discussions
we have had concerning semantic prosody, and in particular his comments about what it
means to “sound right.”
. In his article of 2000, Louw points out “ that it is the first duty of the scientist [following
Popper’s thinking] to ensure that his claims are potentially falsifiable” (Louw 2000: 61). This
would apply only to the analogy with Amen, which in fact would prove to be false. The other
arguments Louw uses, based on metaphor and analogy, are simply not falsifiable – hence,
according to Louw himself – unscientific.
. See Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962).
. One of the main problems with priming as a metaphor associated with firing, however, is
that priming works, in a sense, when nothing gets fired. We are primed to expect patterns, and
when these patterns appear, nothing fires, as it were. It would be as if something meaningful
occurs only when there is a misfire, or a backfire, or something like Louw’s “collocational
clash.”
. Rosamund Moon, a lexicographer who worked on the Collins COBUILD project, and
contributed a chapter entitled, “The Analysis of Meaning,” in Sinclair’s book, Looking Up
(1987), writes the following concerning the question of metaphor: “It is the case that most
senses of most words may be used metaphorically, or may be extended in meaning and used
in a new or novel collocation” (1987: 88).
 JB[v.20020404] Prn:5/08/2005; 14:42 F: IJC10301.tex / p.22 (1077-1167)

 Sam Whitsitt

. I am referring to the infrequent, “live” metaphor, as it were, rather than frequently used
“dead” metaphors.
. The other instance is, “The burlesque is most apparent where learned words keep com-
pany with the homely and seafaring. . . ,” from Style in Fiction (Harlow: Longmans 1987), by
Michael H. Short and Geoffrey Leech. Given the authors, it is perhaps not surprising to find
this particular collocation of a “word” keeping company.

References

Bublitz, W. (1996). Semantic Prosody and Cohesive Company: Somewhat Predictable.

Leuvense Bijdragen: Tijdschrift voor Germaanse Filologie, 85 (1–2), 1–32.
Church, K. (2001). Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: What’s
Happened Since the First SIGDAT Meeting? Available at: www-2cs.smu.edu/∼
ref/naacl/dekang/church.html, 1–4.
Collins COBUILD English Dictionary for Advanced Learners (2001). Sinclair, J. (Ed.). London:
HarperCollins.
Cotterill, J. (2001). Domestic discord, rocky relationships: semantic prosodies in represen-
tations of marital violence in the O.J. Simpson trial. In Discourse & Society, 12 (3),
292–312.
Fielding, H. (1996 [1749]). Tom Jones. Bender, J. & Stern, S. (Eds.). Oxford World’s Classics.
Oxford / New York: Oxford University Press.
Firth, J. (1957). A Synopsis of Linguistic Theory 1930–1955. In F. Palmer (Ed.) (1968),
Selected Papers of J. R. Firth: 1952–1959. London: Longman.
Hoey, M. (1997). From Concordance to Text Structure: New uses for computer corpora.
In B. Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk & P. J. Melia (Eds.), Proceedings from International
Conference on Practical Applications in Language Corpora (pp. 3–23). Lodz, Poland,
10–14 April 1997.
Hoey, M. (2003). Lexical Priming and the Properties of Text. Available from:
www.monabaker.com /tsresources/LexicalPrimingandthePropertiesofText.htm (pp. 1–
15).
Hunston, S. (2000). Colligation, lexis, pattern, and text. In M. Scott & G. Thompson (Eds.),
Patterns of Text: In honour of Michael Hoey (pp. 13–33). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Hunston, S. (2002). Corpora in Applied Linguistics. London: Cambridge University Press.
Kuhn, T. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Leech, G. (1996). Semantic Prosody and Cohesive Company: Somewhat Predictable.
Leuvense Bijdragen: Tijdschrift voor Germaanse Filologie, 85 (1–2), 1–32.
Louw, B. (1993). Irony in the Text or Insincerity in the Writer: The diagnostic potential
of semantic prosody. In M. Baker, G. Francis, & E. Tognini-Bonelli (Eds.), Text and
Technology: In honour of John Sinclair (pp. 157–174). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Louw, B. (2000). Contextual prosodic theory: Bringing semantic prosodies to life. In C.
Heffer & H. Saunston (Eds.), Words in Context. Discourse Analysis Monograph 18 [CD
Rom]. Birmingham: University of Birmingham.
JB[v.20020404] Prn:5/08/2005; 14:42 F: IJC10301.tex / p.23 (1167-1258)

A critique of the concept of semantic prosody 

Moon, R. (1987). The Analysis of Meaning. In J. Sinclair (Ed.), Looking Up (pp. 86–103).
London: Collins.
Oxford English Dictionary (1989). 2nd Edn. Weiner, E. S. C., Simpson, J. A., (Eds.). Oxford:
Clarendon.
Partington, A. (1998). Patterns and Meanings. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Sinclair, J. (1987). The Nature of the Evidence. In J. Sinclair (Ed.), Looking Up (pp. 150–159).
London: Collins.
Sinclair, J. (1991). Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sinclair, J. (1994). Trust the Text. In M. Coulthard (Ed.), Advances in Written Text Analysis
(pp. 12–25). New York: Routledge.
Sinclair, J. (1996a). The Search for Units of Meaning. Textus, IX, 75–106.
Sinclair, J. (1996b). The Empty Lexicon. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 1 (1),
99–119.
Sinclair, J. (1999). The Lexical Item. In E. Weigand (Ed.), Contrastive Lexical Semantics,
Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, Vol. 17 (pp. 1–24). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Stubbs, M. (1995a). Corpus Evidence for norms of lexical collocation. In G. Cook & B.
Seidlhofer (Eds.), Principle and Practice in Applied Linguistics (pp. 245–256). Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Stubbs, M. (1995b). Collocations and semantic profiles. In Functions of Language, 2 (1),
23–55.
Stubbs, M. (1996). Text and Corpus Analysis: Computer-assisted Studies of Language and
Culture. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Inc.
Stubbs, M. (2001). Words and Phrases: Corpus Studies of Lexical Semantics. Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers Inc.
Tognini-Bonelli, E. (2001). Corpus Linguistics at Work. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Williams, R. (1988 [1976]). Key Words. London: Fontana Press (Harper Collins).

Author’s address
Sam Whitsitt
Assistant Professor of Linguistics
Scuola Superiore di Lingue Moderne per
Interpreti e Traduttori dell’Università di Bologna
a Forlì
136 Corso della Repubblica
47100 Forli
Ita1y
E-mail address: LES3982@iperbole.bologna.it