In this paper I wish to examine the two related concepts of semantic prosody and semantic preference. I will begin the section on each with a definition, attempt a review of relevant current positions and then describe a number of corpus-based experiments I conducted to throw light on the two phenomena. Finally, I will try to draw some conclusions about the relationship between them.
2026. Construction Approach to Semantic Prosody of the Verb study: A Corpus-based Study. Corpus Pragmatics 10:1
Sardinha, Tony Berber & Shannon Fitzsimmons-Doolan
2026. Lexical Multidimensional Analysis,
Buelow, Franca Angela, Ann Brower & Nicholas Cradock-Henry
2025. Framing resilience: Post-disaster communication in Aotearoa-New Zealand. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction 117 ► pp. 105167 ff.
Elewa, Abdelhamid
2025. A corpus-based analysis of gendered language in spoken religious discourse. Applied Corpus Linguistics 5:3 ► pp. 100137 ff.
Gan, Qiao & Jingyuan Ye
2025. Contextualizing the variation in causal clause ordering in Mandarin Chinese: a multifactorial analysis. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory
González Romero, Luisa
2025. On the use of the way-construction with the verb make: A diachronic perspective . Complutense Journal of English Studies 33 ► pp. e102798 ff.
Jensen, Kim Ebensgaard
2025.
Well, maybe you shouldn’t go around shaving poodles: collostructional semantic and discursive prosody in the go (a)round Ving and go (a)round and V constructions. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 21:3 ► pp. 577 ff.
Koca-Helvacı, Zeynep Cihan
2025. A Critical Analysis of the British Newspapers’ Coverage of the Underweight and Overweight. Revista Brasileira de Linguística Aplicada 25:1
Men, Haiyan & Zhixia Yang
2025. 2025 IEEE 17th International Conference on Computer Research and Development (ICCRD), ► pp. 260 ff.
Newman, John
2025. Revisiting N waiting to happen: word, construction, and corpus choices in a collostructional analysis. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 21:3 ► pp. 713 ff.
Nguyen, Minh Hieu & Brian Clancy
2025. Representations of LGBT people in Vietnamese online newspapers: A corpus-assisted critical discourse study. Discourse & Society
Natalya A. Osmak
2025. Collocations with the Nomination ‘‘Russia’’ in the Corpus of Finno-Ugric Internet Travelogues. Finno-Ugric world 17:1 ► pp. 35 ff.
Partington, Alan & Eugenia Diegoli
2025. Lexical Priming theory. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 30:3 ► pp. 352 ff.
Zhang, Dan & Yang Zhang
2025. Discursive Construction of Sino-US Trade Dispute: A Corpus-assisted Discourse Analysis of News Coverage in Chinese Mainland, the US and Hong Kong. Sage Open 15:4
倪, 涵悦
2025. A Study on the Extended Unit of Meaning of the Verb “Develop” Based on the COCA Corpus. Modern Linguistics 13:08 ► pp. 548 ff.
2024.
Referential pronouns
it, this
, and
that
in university classroom discourse
. International Journal of English for Academic Purposes: Research and Practice 4:1 ► pp. 29 ff.
Demir, Süleyman & Işıl Özyıldırım
2024. LEXICAL PROFILE OF A TURKISH SADNESS VERB DERTLEN-: A CORPUS DRIVEN ANALYSIS. Dil Dergisi 175:2 ► pp. 1 ff.
Demir, Süleyman & Işıl Özyıldırım
2024. Semantic and Pragmatic Analysis of a Turkish Sadness Verb Hüzünlen-. Mavi Atlas 12:2 ► pp. 518 ff.
Diegoli, Eugenia & Emily Öhman
2024. Contrasting the semantic space of ‘shame’ and ‘guilt’ in English and Japanese. Language and Cognition 16:4 ► pp. 1296 ff.
Grabowski, Łukasz & Aleksandar Trklja
2024. Unravelling the complexity of semantic prosody: A theoretical inquiry. Journal of Pragmatics 226 ► pp. 89 ff.
Hauser, David J. & James Hillman
2024. What Does It Mean to Be “Utterly Content”? Semantic Prosody Impacts Nuanced Inferences Beyond Just Valence. Social Cognition 42:1 ► pp. 61 ff.
Jamet, Denis & Christophe Coupé
2024. A study of the semantic preference and semantic prosody associated with the denominations of aging people. Journal of Language and Aging Research 2:1 ► pp. 47 ff.
Junnier, Frances & Galina Shleykina
2024. Contesting spaces. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict
Looi, Jarvis & Alessandra Cacciato
2024. Data-driven learning: Technology-enhanced learning of semantic prosody. Alsic 27:1
Malory, Beth
2024. Polarized Discourses of Abortion in English: A Corpus-based Study of Semantic Prosody and Discursive Salience. Applied Linguistics 45:3 ► pp. 481 ff.
Nayak, Gopa & Navreet Kaur Rana
2024. 7. ‘Aboutness’ and semantic knowledge. In Digital Humanities in the India Rim, ► pp. 127 ff.
Ramos Ruiz, Álvaro
2024. La construcción mediática del coronavirus a través de los verbos empleados por la prensa europea. European Public & Social Innovation Review 9 ► pp. 1 ff.
Russnes, Mathias
2024. Semantic prosody, semantic transfer and semantic change. ICAME Journal 48:1 ► pp. 67 ff.
Russnes, Mathias
2025. Semantic prosody, categorisation and inter-rater reliability. Research Methods in Applied Linguistics 4:3 ► pp. 100264 ff.
Russnes, Mathias
2025.
In and out of
Possession
: How Football Terms Can Illustrate the Connection Between Polysemy and the Register-Sensitivity of Semantic Prosody
. English Studies► pp. 1 ff.
Sojda, Sylwia
2024. Prozodia semantyczna w dyskursie politycznym (porównanie polsko-słowackie). Acta Universitatis Lodziensis. Folia Linguistica 58:2 ► pp. 49 ff.
Benenowska, Iwona & Anna Bączkowska
2023. “Nobody from the Kossaks family has mounted a horse with a knife and fork so far” – Axiolinguistic analysis of evaluative culinary language in letters written by Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska. Forum Filologiczne Ateneum :1(11)2023 ► pp. 113 ff.
Cao, Dung & Richard Badger
2023. Cross-linguistic influence on the use of L2 collocations: the case of Vietnamese learners. Applied Linguistics Review 14:3 ► pp. 421 ff.
Gillings, Mathew, Gerlinde Mautner & Paul Baker
2023. Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies,
Hassan, Dr Sawsan H.
2023. A Corpus-Based Approach Towards Investigating the Collocations of the Synonymous Nouns Problem, Difficulty and Trouble. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES 13:3 ► pp. 208 ff.
Hussein, Yusra A.
2023. A Semantic Study of Intensifiers . Journal of Tikrit University for Humanities 30:4, 1 ► pp. 55 ff.
2023. Collocations, Corpora and Language Learning,
Wang, Yingjie, Matt Coler & Gisela Redeker
2023. A contrastive study on the representation of “Made in China” in Chinese and U.S. newspapers. Frontiers in Communication 8
Al-Otaibi, Ghuzayyil Mohammed
2022. Semantic Prosody of Research Verbs: A Corpus-Informed Study. Journal of Language and Education 8:2 ► pp. 48 ff.
Al-Otaibi, Ghuzayyil Mohammed
2025. Semantic prosody of deictic verbs in the Holy Qurʾān: a corpus study. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 12:1
Alcaraz-Mármol, Gema & Jorge Soto-Almela
2022. Refugees’ dehumanization in the Spanish media: A corpus-assisted study within the semantic preference framework
. Applied Linguistics Review 13:5 ► pp. 791 ff.
AYTAÇ DEMİRÇİVİ, Kadriye
2022. A Corpus-Based Comparative Analysis of Dedikodu and Gıybet in Turkish. Dil Eğitimi ve Araştırmaları Dergisi 8:2 ► pp. 249 ff.
Di Martino, Emilia
2022. New Digital Media and the Chav. In Indexing ‘Chav’ on Social Media, ► pp. 155 ff.
2022. “I never get a thing that ain’t been used”: A diachronic corpus-based study of second-hand consumption. Journal of World Languages 8:2 ► pp. 254 ff.
Grabowski, Łukasz
2022. Provoke or encourage improvements? On semantic prosody in English-to-Polish translation. Perspectives 30:1 ► pp. 120 ff.
2022. ICERD in Malaysian online news reports: Analysis of rhetoric and public opinion. Social Sciences & Humanities Open 6:1 ► pp. 100318 ff.
Liu, Jianpeng, Luyao Zhang & Xiaohui Bai
2022. Dependency network-based approach to the implicit structure and semantic diffusion modes of semantic prosody. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 18:3 ► pp. 505 ff.
Liu, Jiaqi
2022. Lexical Features of Economic Legal Policy and News in China Since the COVID-19 Outbreak. Frontiers in Public Health 10
Martič, Matjaž
2022. Semantična prozodija v specializiranih besedilih. Journal for Foreign Languages 14:1 ► pp. 7 ff.
Nießner, Tobias, Daniel H. Gross & Matthias Schumann
2022. Evidential Strategies in Financial Statement Analysis: A Corpus Linguistic Text Mining Approach to Bankruptcy Prediction. Journal of Risk and Financial Management 15:10 ► pp. 459 ff.
Pan, Yun
2022. Searching for the unit of meaning: Knowledge construction in university small group talk. Applied Linguistics Review 13:5 ► pp. 899 ff.
2022. Sacrificing long hair and the domestic sphere: Reporting on female medical workers in Chinese online news during Covid-19. Discourse & Society 33:5 ► pp. 650 ff.
Supanfai, Pornthip
2022. People or Persons?: A Corpus-based Study. rEFLections 29:3 ► pp. 603 ff.
2021. Corpus Linguistic Methodology as an Advanced Conversion Design for Social Science Research. International Journal of Multiple Research Approaches 13:3 ► pp. 254 ff.
Dushku, Silvana & Youngshil Paek
2021. Investigating ESL learners’ awareness of semantic prosody across proficiency levels. Language Awareness 30:3 ► pp. 234 ff.
Hsu, Chan-Chia
2021. Categorization as appraisal: Using classificatory verbs in Chinese for evaluative purposes. Journal of Pragmatics 184 ► pp. 107 ff.
PHOOCHAROENSİL, Supakorn
2021. Semantic prosody and collocation: A corpus study of the near-synonyms persist and persevere. Eurasian Journal of Applied Linguistics► pp. 240 ff.
Sivaeva, O.
2021. SEMANTIC PROSODY OF THE LEMMA VACCINE IN THE MEDIA TEXTS. Studia Philologica 1:16 ► pp. 42 ff.
Soro, Tommie, Tim Stott & Brendan K. O’Rourke
2021. The rules of the game: discursive norms and limits in the field of online art magazines. Social Semiotics 31:2 ► pp. 324 ff.
Sun, Hui & Huaizhong Zhu
2021. 2021 9th International Conference on Information and Education Technology (ICIET), ► pp. 396 ff.
Weizman, Elda & Anita Fetzer
2021. The discursive construction of accountability for communicative action to citizens: A contrastive analysis across Israeli and British media discourse. Intercultural Pragmatics 18:5 ► pp. 605 ff.
Zhang, Hong
2021. “What do you know about semantic prosody?” Teaching and evaluating implicit knowledge of English with corpus-assisted methods. English in Education 55:4 ► pp. 337 ff.
ADIGÜZEL, Muhammet Fatih & Yeşim AKSAN
2020. Exploring the Turkish Concept İrkil-: Corpus-driven Cognitive and Lexical Profiling of a Pre-emotion. Dil Eğitimi ve Araştırmaları Dergisi 6:2 ► pp. 428 ff.
2020. Karşıtlıkların Anlambilimsel Söylem Ezgisi: Hafif ve Ağır Düğüm Sözcükleri Üzerine Bir Değerlendirme. Söylem Filoloji Dergisi 5:2 ► pp. 415 ff.
Li, Xiaohong & Naixing Wei
2020. Exploring the Roles of Semantic Prosody and Semantic Preference for Achieving Cross-Language Equivalence: A Corpus-based Contrastive Analysis of Translation Pairs in English and Chinese. In Corpus-based Translation and Interpreting Studies in Chinese Contexts, ► pp. 115 ff.
Omidian, Taha & Anna Siyanova‐Chanturia
2020. Semantic Prosody Revisited: Implications for Language Learning. TESOL Quarterly 54:2 ► pp. 512 ff.
Pérez Blanco, María
2020. Evidential adjectives in English and Spanish journalistic opinion discourse. Journal of Pragmatics 170 ► pp. 112 ff.
Shin, Yu Kyoung
2020. Evaluative prosody and semantic preference: Extending the analysis of recurrent multiword sequences. English for Specific Purposes 59 ► pp. 45 ff.
Wulff, Stefanie & Paul Baker
2020. Analyzing Concordances. In A Practical Handbook of Corpus Linguistics, ► pp. 161 ff.
2019. Utilising Corpus Linguistic Tools for Analysing Social Change in Risk. In Researching Risk and Uncertainty [Critical Studies in Risk and Uncertainty, ], ► pp. 337 ff.
Zinn, Jens O.
2020. Understanding Social and Linguistic Change. In The UK ‘at Risk’ [Critical Studies in Risk and Uncertainty, ], ► pp. 19 ff.
Dong, Jihua & Louisa Buckingham
2018. The collocation networks of stance phrases. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 36 ► pp. 119 ff.
Dong, Jihua & Louisa Buckingham
2022. Identity construction and its collocation networks: a cross-register analysis of the finance domain. Text & Talk 42:5 ► pp. 647 ff.
Hauser, David J. & Norbert Schwarz
2018. How seemingly innocuous words can bias judgment: Semantic prosody and impression formation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 75 ► pp. 11 ff.
Hauser, David J. & Norbert Schwarz
2022. Implicit Bias Reflects the Company That Words Keep. Frontiers in Psychology 13
Hauser, David J. & Norbert Schwarz
2023. Semantic Prosody: How Neutral Words With Collocational Positivity/Negativity Color Evaluative Judgments. Current Directions in Psychological Science 32:2 ► pp. 98 ff.
2017. Pragmatic meaning in contrast: semantic prosodies of Slovene and English. Perspectives 25:1 ► pp. 157 ff.
Jurko, Primož
2022. Semantic prosody of Slovene adverb–verb collocations: introducing the top-down approach. Corpora 17:1 ► pp. 39 ff.
Kopf, Susanne
2017. The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) in the Kronen Zeitung. Discourse, Context & Media 20 ► pp. 45 ff.
Snefjella, Bryor & Victor Kuperman
2016. It’s all in the delivery: Effects of context valence, arousal, and concreteness on visual word processing. Cognition 156 ► pp. 135 ff.
Wu, Zhong & Lihua Li
2016. A Contrastive Study on Semantic Prosodies of Minimal Degree Adverbs in Chinese and English. In Semantic Technology [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 9544], ► pp. 209 ff.
양재원
2016. A comparative study on amplifier use and preference between Korean English learners and native English speakers. English Language Teaching 28:2 ► pp. 171 ff.
Baider, Fabienne H.
2015. Évaluation de la présidentiabilité (à l’interface de la sémantique lexicale et de la linguistique de corpus). Mots :108 ► pp. 103 ff.
2015. Representations of Gender and Agency in the Harry Potter Series. In Corpora and Discourse Studies, ► pp. 266 ff.
Potts, Amanda
2015. Filtering the Flood: Semantic Tagging as a Method of Identifying Salient Discourse Topics in a Large Corpus of Hurricane Katrina Reportage. In Corpora and Discourse Studies, ► pp. 285 ff.
2015. Semantic prosody of the degree adverb nemu: An analysis based on a speech corpus.. Studies in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology 21:2 ► pp. 223 ff.
Blanco-Suárez, Zeltia
2014. Oh he is olde dogge at expoundingdeadesure at a Catechisme: Some considerations on the history of the intensifying adverbdeadin English. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 46:1 ► pp. 117 ff.
Gu, Xin-yuan
2014. A critical discourse analysis of the Asian Women’s Fund website. Discourse & Society 25:6 ► pp. 725 ff.
Núñez Pertejo, Paloma & Ignacio M. Palacios Martínez
2014. ‘Goblins, owles and sprites’: Discerning early-modern English preternatural beings through collocational analysis. Religion 44:4 ► pp. 547 ff.
신수영
2014. A corpus-based study on semantic prosodies of Chinese near-synonym : with daozhi(導致)and yinqi(引起) as an example. The Journal of Study on Language and Culture of Korea and China null:36 ► pp. 79 ff.
Dury, Pascaline
2013. Quelle(s) traduction(s) pour le terme anglais greenwashing ? Quelques observations croisées en terminologie. Traduire :229 ► pp. 26 ff.
Forchini, Pierfranca
2013. A diachronic study of familiarizers (‘man’, ‘guys’, ‘buddy’, ‘dude’) in movie language. Perspectives 21:4 ► pp. 504 ff.
Grutschus, Anke, Beate Kern & Agnès Tutin
2013. La polarité du lexique de l’affect : perspective combinatoire et contrastive. In Cartographie des émotions, ► pp. 85 ff.
Sung,Il-Ho
2013. Teaching English Near Synonyms Using Corpora.. Studies in English Language & Literature 39:2 ► pp. 173 ff.
Yeonchang Jung
2013. A Corpus-Based Study of the Use of the Adjectives Lovely and Cute. English Language and Linguistics 19:2 ► pp. 185 ff.
Yeonchang Jung
2014. A Corpus-Based Analysis of English ‘hot+noun’ Expressions: The Lexical Approach. The New Korean Journal of English Lnaguage & Literature 56:2 ► pp. 169 ff.
김철규
2013. The Metaphorical Meanings of the Korean Adjective chakhan in Korean Newspapers from 1990 to 2011. Discourse and Cognition 20:3 ► pp. 89 ff.
McGee, Iain
2012. Should We Teach Semantic Prosody Awareness?. RELC Journal 43:2 ► pp. 169 ff.
Mi-Lim Ryoo
2012. Lexico-grammatical Association Patterns of Little vs. Small and Big vs. Large in EFL Students’ Writing: A corpus-based study. English Language Teaching 24:4 ► pp. 113 ff.
Mi-Lim Ryoo
2014. Examining the semantic prosody of lexical items as used in Korean contexts. English Language Teaching 26:3 ► pp. 21 ff.
Partington, Alan
2011. Phrasal irony: Its form, function and exploitation. Journal of Pragmatics 43:6 ► pp. 1786 ff.
Partington, Alan
2014. Evaluative prosody. In Corpus Pragmatics, ► pp. 279 ff.
Partington, Alan
2014. Mind the gaps. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 19:1 ► pp. 118 ff.
Partington, Alan
2017. Evaluative clash, evaluative cohesion and how we actually read evaluation in texts. Journal of Pragmatics 117 ► pp. 190 ff.
Shinwoong Lee
2011. Semantic Prosody in Bilingual Dictionaries and EFL Learners’ Sentence Writings. English Teaching 66:2 ► pp. 253 ff.
Aaron, Jessi Elana
2010. An Awkward Companion: Disability and the Semantic Landscape of English Lame. Journal of English Linguistics 38:1 ► pp. 25 ff.
Koteyko, Nelya
2010. Mining the internet for linguistic and social data: An analysis of ‘carbon compounds’ in Web feeds. Discourse & Society 21:6 ► pp. 655 ff.
Zeldes, Amir
2010. Tony McEnery, Richard Xiao & Yukio Tono. 2006. Corpus-Based Language Studies. An Advanced Resource Book (Routledge Applied Linguistics). London, New York: Routledge. xx, 386 S. Zeitschrift für Rezensionen zur germanistischen Sprachwissenschaft 2:2
김희진 & Lee, Jae-eun
2010. The Authenticity of English Maximizers in High School English Textbooks: The Cases of absolutely, totally, utterly, completely and entirely. Studies in English Language & Literature 36:1 ► pp. 219 ff.
Partington, Alan Scott
2009. A linguistic account of wordplay: The lexical grammar of punning. Journal of Pragmatics 41:9 ► pp. 1794 ff.
Stubbs, Michael
2009. Memorial Article: John Sinclair (1933–2007). Applied Linguistics 30:1 ► pp. 115 ff.
Stubbs, Michael
2015. Computer‐Assisted Methods of Analyzing Textual and Intertextual Competence. In The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, ► pp. 486 ff.
Corrigan, Roberta
2008. Beyond the Obvious. Communication Disorders Quarterly 29:2 ► pp. 109 ff.
EunJooLee
2008. An analysis of corpus-based research on TEFL and applied linguistics.. English Teaching 63:2 ► pp. 283 ff.
Ooi, V. B.Y.
2008. The Lexis of Electronic Gaming on the Web: A Sinclairian Approach. International Journal of Lexicography 21:3 ► pp. 311 ff.
Brownlie, Siobhan
2007. De l’emploi récurrent de cause dans la première traduction de Nana : quel commentaire ?. Palimpsestes :20 ► pp. 97 ff.
MAUTNER, GERLINDE
2007. Mining large corpora for social information: The case of
elderly. Language in Society 36:1 ► pp. 51 ff.
Mautner, Gerlinde
2008. Tony McEnery, Richard Xiao & YuKio Tono, Corpus-based language studies: An advanced resource book. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Pp. xix, 386. Pb $33.95.. Language in Society 37:3 ► pp. 455 ff.
Mautner, Gerlinde
2011. Die kritische Masse. Korpuslinguistik und kritische Diskursanalyse. In Korpuspragmatik, ► pp. 83 ff.
Tao, Hongyin
2007. A Corpus-Based Investigation of Absolutely and Related Phenomena in Spoken American English. Journal of English Linguistics 35:1 ► pp. 5 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 12 december 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
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