[Corpora-List] My semantic prosody questionnaire

[Xiao, Zhonghua]

Irene,
 
Your experiment just lent more credibility to the observation made by many corpus linguists that intuitions can be a poor guide in collocations and especially in semantic prosodies. Many speakers are not consciously aware of semantic prosodies until what is observed in corpora has been shown to them. Then their reaction is usually something like "It is indeed so, but why didn't I think of that?" Therefore the results of your experiment are hardly surprising.

Even a word like "cause", which is widely observed to bear a strong negative semantic prosody, is found to co-occur with "pleasure" and something desirable in corpora. But such cases are extremely rare in relation to those with negative semantic prosodies. Anyway, a corpus only shows what is central and typical in language use.
 
I think you can compare native speaker and non-native speaker intuitions in semantic prosodies by comparing native English corpora and learner English corpora. There are many learner corpora which are publicly available.
 
Best,
 
Richard
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From: owner-corpora at lists.uib.no on behalf of Irena Shuke
Sent: Fri 21/01/2005 22:22
To: CORPORA at hd.uib.no
Subject: [Corpora-List] My semantic prosody questionnaire



Dear all,

I just received a questionnaire I had sent to England to be filled out by
native speakers to see their awareness of semantic prosody. I knew (AND had
been told) that it was best to just observe it in a corpus, but my aim was
to see (compare) the difference between native and non-native speakers with
respect to this. To test the intuitions of the both sides, so to say. (Well,
I guess I did always want to see with my own eyes how native speakers would
circle the "correct" sentence, such as 'She caused me a lot of trouble', and
leave one like 'She caused me a lot of joy' alone.) Anyway, I thought a
questionnaire given to both native and non-native speakers would show
clearly the difference. First, I got them filled out by some of my fellow MA
students (Linguistics, English Literature & ELT Methodology) who were all
non-native speakers of English. Only one person scored enough for me to see
she was showing consistent awareness of this phenomenon, but then, she and I
had been discussing this, so I guess that doesn't count, although she had
only been given one particular example ("cause") earlier in our discussions.
(By "scored enough" I do not mean any particular percentage since I still
have to decide how to best display my clever "findings".) A LOT of other
respondents ticked off "Engineering of these goods will favourably affect
the market" and "She caused me a lot of joy" as correct (acceptable, not
"correct", but for some reason I tend to use the words "right/correct" and
"wrong" when I think of it), or both the sentence that contained "caused me
joy" and the one with "caused me trouble" in the same set, or ticked off
"positively affect" and "favourably affect" but left out "seriously affect"
and "badly affect" as unlikely. I decided to wait for the same questionnaire
to come back from England where it would be administered to native speakers.
I have to say that most of the sentences were either taken from a corpus AND
modified or plain invented by me (esp. the provocative ones with the
"unacceptable" collocations), because I didn't really want to underline the
collocations that were to be thought about - so I decided to try to make all
the sentences in one set look similar in form, so that only THE collocation
would stand out in each of them by being the only different element. I did
suspect that the respondents, esp. native speakers, might be put off by just
any wrong collocation in a sentence before they even got to rejecting the
sentence due to the clash of semantic prosodies. I also stated in the
instructions that all of the sentences are correct grammatically. And before
administering it to anyone at all, I had also shown the questionnaire to a
tutor of mine just to make sure in general (she is a non-native speaker
too).
So I waited.

Well, today I got 15 precious questionnaires from England. (Obviously it was
not possible to get more in, but even these do illustrate something.)

I looked at some of them and then double-checked the last "question" on each
of them, i.e. 'Is English your mother tongue?' All said yes. Anyway, here
are the results. 'She caused me a lot of trouble', 'She caused me a lot of
misery', 'She caused me a lot of happiness', 'She caused me a lot of joy'
are all ticked off as "likely to be used" in quite a few(!) people's
responses. 'Engineering of these goods will favourably affect the market' -
just fine in someone else's work. 'Caused me a lot of joy' - OK, but 'caused
me a lot of happiness' - left out as "unlikely". I really don't know what to
think. In some cases it might have been even ambiguity that I myself hadn't
noticed, as in "Engineering of these goods will positively affect the
market', which possibly might have been interpreted as "definitely". Yet,
that is still not the only case. I myself really liked "cause" because it
just seems very diagnostic to me, so I was hoping to see some consistency
there. Alas.

I am thinking now that perhaps it would make sense to put together a corpus
of non-native students' works (for example) and see how they do or do not
distinguish any semantic prosody patterns there, and of course there are a
lot of corpora for researching native speakers' language.

I really apologize if this seems outrageous, I do not mean to upset or
disgust anyone. I guess I just had slightly different expectations (or
hopes) of this experiment.
I would be thankful for any opinions and input.

Irena
(MA Student of Linguistics, University of Latvia)

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