Semantic Prosody in Specialized Texts
The Case of Slovene and English Annual Reports
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.4312/vestnik.14.7-26Keywords:
corpus, semantic prosody, genre, annual report, contrastive analysisAbstract
The paper discusses the semantic prosody of selected most frequent words from the field of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in annual reports of English and Slovene companies, which were studied using a corpus approach. The aim is to understand semantic prosody as an expression of evaluative meaning, which indicates the typical co-occurrence of words or phrases with lexical units that have a positive or negative meaning. Furthermore, semantic prosody also expresses the writer/speaker attitude and is thus a component of pragmatic or functional meaning. In studying semantic prosody, we focus on the concept of local prosody, according to which words in certain genres can establish local semantic prosodies, which typically occur only in those genres. We built a specialized corpus of English and Slovene annual reports, divided it into English and Slovene subcorpora and used corpus analysis to identify the most frequent words from the CSR domain in each subcorpus. We were interested in the differences or similarities between the semantic prosody of selected English and Slovene words. Based on collocational and colligational patterns and semantic preferences, and particularly on the study of wider contextual environment and its pragmatic interpretation, we identified the evaluative and pragmatic meanings of selected words. We found predominantly positive evaluative meanings for both English and Slovene words, and considerable similarities in their pragmatic meanings. We sought the reasons for this mainly in the structure of the subcorpora structure, which include texts belonging to the genre of annual reports. Annual reports of English and Slovene companies have both an informative and a persuasive function and, as a public relations tool, are intended to promote a positive image of the company. At the end of the paper, we emphasise the importance of semantic prosody in pedagogical practice and point out some possibilities for future research.
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