Milli mála - 2021, Blaðsíða 167
166 Milli mála 13/2021
Corpora not only reveal the frequency of a particular word/phrase
but also provide information about how frequently a particular
word co-occurs with other words, or “collocation,” which has long
been studied in the field of corpus linguistics (see, for example,
McEnery, Xiao and Tono 2006, 80−85; Hunston 2002, Ch. 5).4
Indeed, when we discuss collocations, frequency information may
not necessarily be essential. For example, it would not be very dif-
ficult for most English speakers to suggest the word hair as a sig-
nificant collocate of auburn (Deignan 1999, 23). However, even
native speakers are not in full agreement about acceptable colloca-
tional patterns (Partington 1998, 18), and corpus research on col-
locations is important because the statistical method enhances reli-
ability (Hunston 2002, 68).
In fact, some collocational patterns are less intuitively obvious to
native speakers, and semantic prosody is one such phenomenon
expressing an attitudinal meaning of a word/phrase established
through a set of semantically consistent collocates (e.g. Sinclair
1987; Louw 1993; 2000; Stubbs 2001a). In previous studies, atten-
tion has mostly been paid to English, but cross-linguistic studies
have also been conducted (e.g. Ebeling 2014). Nevertheless, there
has been little focus on the application of corpus data to the seman-
tic analysis of Icelandic words/phrases, and very few quantitative
studies of Icelandic collocations have been carried out. Therefore, in
this study, the idea of semantic prosody as a tool for analysing a
specific case of less obvious collocations in Icelandic is introduced.
The adverb gersamlega is taken as an example and its usage discussed
based on frequency data. By analysing an Icelandic word and its
collocations using corpora, this study aims at showing that corpus
data is extremely useful for understanding the Icelandic words/
phrases and elaborating their descriptions in Icelandic dictionaries.
For analysis, the present study used the Icelandic Gigaword
4 According to Sinclair (1991, 170), collocation is defined as “the occurrence of two or more words
within a short space of each other in a text.” As collocation is often measured statistically, it can
even indicate “the statistical tendency of words to co-occur” (Hunston 2002, 12). For Icelandic,
collocation is called “orðastæður” or “kollókasjónir” (Jón Hilmar Jónsson 1998, 23). It has often
been referred to in relation to descriptions in dictionaries (e.g., Jón Hilmar Jónsson 1998; Jón
Hilmar Jónsson & Þórdís Úlfarsdóttir 2011), and Íslenskt orðanet, developed by Jón Hilmar Jónsson
(2006–2020), provides collocational information on Icelandic words.
SEMANTIC PROSODY IN ICELANDIC
10.33112/millimala.13.7