Semantic prosodies in English and Portuguese : A contrastive study

The present study is aimed at describing the semantic prosody of equivalent items in English and Portuguese. Semantic prosody is the connotation conveyed by the regular co-occurrence of lexical items, as revealed by the exploration of a computer-readable corpus. Although there are several studies dealing with semantic prosody in English, only one has looked at this issue contrasting English and Portuguese. In general, the findings indicate important similarities and differences between the two languages, and point toward inadequacies in contemporary dictionaries. The study was based on the exploration of a Portuguese computer corpus of over 140 million words, one of the largest for Portuguese. The BNC, with 100 million words, was also used in the course of the investigation. The general conclusion of the study presented here is that information on connotation, especially that based on the exploration of corpora, should be part of glossaries and dictionaries, particularly production and bilingual dictionaries, which are tools that translators rely upon regularly.