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Sinclair 1987, 1991; Louw 1993, 2000; Stubbs 2001a; Partington
1998, 2004). According to Louw (2000, 57), it is defined as “a form
of meaning which is established through the proximity of a consist-
ent series of collocates,” and its primary function is to express a
particular attitudinal or evaluative meaning toward a pragmatic
situation (p. 58).7 The term semantic prosody first appears in Louw
(1993), but this concept can already be seen in Sinclair (1987). One
example is the phrasal verb set in (pp. 155–156). Sinclair found that
the expression generally refers to unpleasant states of affairs for
subjects such as rot, decay, and malaise, and interestingly, none of its
subjects was desirable or attractive. As this phrase principally men-
tions unpleasant situations, speakers can use it to express a negative
attitude without explicitly stating so. In this way, semantic prosody
often carries a negative attitude (less frequently positive), but it can
also be violated, for example, for the purpose of ironic effect.8
Although many studies of semantic prosody have focused on the
English language, cross-linguistic contrastive studies have also been
conducted. The verb commit, among others, is frequently taken as an
example of a word with negative semantic prosody. For example,
Stubbs (2001a) found that in his corpus, the most frequent collo-
cate of commit is suicide (15 percent), and three collocates, suicide,
crime, and murder, make up nearly 30 percent of all collocates of this
verb. Based on the data, Stubbs claims that the verb commit often
collocates with words relating to crime,9 and concerning the same
7 Although many researchers agree that semantic prosody is connotational (e.g. Partington 1998;
Hunston 2002), it is still not the same as connotation, in that semantic prosody refers only to
collocational associations (McEnery, Xiao and Tono 2006, 85). The term “semantic prosody” is
adopted, because meanings, similarly to intonation in prosody, transcend the words in a sentence
(Louw 1993, 158–159; Lindquist 2009, 58).
8 It is important to note that subtle differences can be found among researchers regarding the defini-
tion of semantic prosody. Partington (2004) regards semantic prosody as binary (positive or nega-
tive) attitudinal meanings, whereas, according to Sinclair (2004), it cannot be defined simply as
good or bad. For example, Sinclair seems to attribute a semantic prosody of difficulty to the phrase
naked eye (p. 33). In this paper, the adverb gersamlega is discussed mainly from the perspective of
negative (or positive) attitudinal meaning, but other important features are also referred to. For
further discussion of the definition of the term, see, for example, Hunston (2007).
9 As in this case, a set of frequent collocates of a word that share some semantic feature is labeled
semantic preference (Stubbs 2001b, 449). Although some researchers consider semantic prosody a
special case of semantic preference (e.g. Partington 2004, 149–151), they nonetheless differ in that
semantic prosody is ascribed to the node word, while semantic preference is a feature of its collo-
cates. For further discussion of semantic prosody and semantic preference, see, for example, Stubbs
(2001a) and Partington (2004).
SEMANTIC PROSODY IN ICELANDIC
10.33112/millimala.13.7