A Corpus-based Study of Semantic Prosody: A Methodological Proposal and a Case Study in ESP Teaching

As semantic prosody plays a significant role in interpreting pragmatic meaning and uncovering ‘hidden attitude’ in a text (Hunston 2002, 2007; Partington 2004), this paper argues that the concept should be integrated into ESP language courses. The development of L2 learner collocational competence forms a standard part of our language classes, as well as a standard goal of textbook materials. Nevertheless, although collocation knowledge and the multi-faceted nature of lexical competence have attracted much interest from language researchers (Richards 1976, Sinclair 1991, inter alia), it is only in the last two decades that corpus linguists have begun to study the process of semantic prosody as an aspect of collocation and lexical patterning. Indeed, with the advent of corpora, software can now extract large amounts of data facilitating the observation of frequency and statistical tendency which has highlighted the relationship between lexical patterning and semantic prosody making this phenomenon more definable and scientific.