Reexaming Semantic Prosody And Attitudinal Meaning

Semantic prosody is an important language mechanism discovered and studied by corpus linguists. Due to the complication of this concept and its interrelation with other aspects of language, there are currently several distinct definitions of it. Though those definitions do not have fundamental disputes, they approach this concept from different perspectives with quite different emphases. Some of these definitions have blurred the distinction between semantic prosody and other concepts like connotation.Through reexamining the three major views on semantic prosody, the present paper aims at seeking the origins of the differences between these definitions as well as their common grounds. Based on the research finding that attitudinal meaning is the theme that links up all the definitions, this paper proposes the working definitions of semantic prosody, connotation and commendatory/derogatory word. Finally, utilization and exploitation of attitudinal meaning are explored on the basis of its observational, explanatory and predictive value.