A critique of the concept of semantic prosody

Abstract

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.

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