Semantic prosody of extended lexical units: A case study

Semantic prosody is typically referred to as an evaluative function of certain words or multiword items appearing within collocates positive negative meaning. The present study deals with the semantic (context properties) extended lexical units (ELUs) according psycholinguistic variables ‘valence’ (emotional positivity), ‘arousal’ (excitement, mood-enhancement), and ‘concreteness’. object investigation are verbal phrases feel blue (unambiguous idiomatic ELU, without a literal counterpart) see red (ambiguous literal). builds on Snefjella & Kuperman (2016) who propose context norms for English basis USENET mega-corpus. For detection ELU representations, questionnaire-based survey was conducted speakers American English. values ELUs, corpus research carried by using Corpus Contemporary (COCA) News Web (NOW). results suggest that contexts largely conform averaged constituents. representations strongly dissociated from contexts.