Collocation, Colligation and Semantic Prosody

Abstract

This paper tries to investigate the relationship between
collocation, colligation and semantic prosody as interdependent and
overlapping notions or phenomena, which are often confused or
misidentified by the majority of advanced learners at the university
level and, even to some extent, by some academics in the field of
English language teaching. At the outset, the three notions are
explicitly defined with typical examples so as to draw a clear-cut
distinction, and establish a well-defined characterization of each one
of them.
The core of the paper is focused on the semantic prosodies of the
lexical item „vitally‟ as cited by the British National Corpus. The
paper also tries to reveal the nature of semantic prosodies of collocates
which form lexical combinations (collocation) or grammatical
combinations (colligation). In addition, we attempt to identify the type
of each semantic prosody (positive, negative, neutral), the genre or
variety and the text domains in which it occurs (leisure, social science,
commerce. finance, applied science, imaginative prose, dialogue,
monologue, etc.).