[Corpora-List] My semantic prosody questionnaire

[Richard Brown]

I find this a very interesting experiment in principal, and would
definitely like to know more.  However, I must say that as a
linguistically aware (teacher of EFL for the last 25 years) native
speaker of English, I found it difficult to see much "wrong" with the
few examples you quoted from your questionnaire. The problem with
collocations is of course that they are only statistical; and there are
sub and sub meanings to every word that make most "unlikely"
collocations possible, and native speakers (by this I mean myself at
least) tend to extrapolate short sentences with unusual collocations in
our mind's eye to see if there is a plausible scenario into which the
collocation can fit.  Maybe you should use long and contextualised
examples to obviate or mitigate this aspect.

Richard Brown

Irena Shuke wrote:

> 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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