求Susan Hunston的文章:Semantic prosody revisited
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回复: 求Susan Hunston的文章:Semantic prosody revisited
http://www.fleric.org/forum/viewthread.php?tid=4144&extra=page=2
其实这篇文章写得很一般。
http://www.fleric.org/forum/viewthread.php?tid=4144&extra=page=2
其实这篇文章写得很一般。
回覆: 回复: 求Susan Hunston的文章:Semantic prosody revisited
Dr. Xu, could you explain further why you think this article is not much insightful?
thx!
Dr. Xu, could you explain further why you think this article is not much insightful?
thx!
回复: 求Susan Hunston的文章:Semantic prosody revisited
In the first place, it is not a very original article. It is a paper which pays "due" tribute to John Sinclair as it appears in the special issue in memory of him.
After a quick look at the abstract, you will agree with me. If you read on, yon won't be able to find anything new either.
In the paper, following John Sinclair, she argues for the unit of meaning, which is by no means a well-defined term. As a corpus linguist, she, as well as John Sinclair, seems to think that a lexical item has inherent meaning only if it is used in context. Meaning in this sense emerges as the cumulative effect of the behavior(s) of the lexical item and its context. Putting together, it can be seen and reduced to the unit of meaning. But this unit of meaning is so elastic and sensitive to context.
If meaning is always contextualized, then in retrospect, in the earliest of language, all words were like tabula rasa and meaningLESS. This is simply impossible. In other words, when words were first used, they had meaning per se. Discourse prosody, or semantic prosody only enables us to observe the meaning with more quantitative/probabilistic confidence.
So semantic prosody approach is not a final/facelift solution to lexical semantics.
In the first place, it is not a very original article. It is a paper which pays "due" tribute to John Sinclair as it appears in the special issue in memory of him.
After a quick look at the abstract, you will agree with me. If you read on, yon won't be able to find anything new either.
In the paper, following John Sinclair, she argues for the unit of meaning, which is by no means a well-defined term. As a corpus linguist, she, as well as John Sinclair, seems to think that a lexical item has inherent meaning only if it is used in context. Meaning in this sense emerges as the cumulative effect of the behavior(s) of the lexical item and its context. Putting together, it can be seen and reduced to the unit of meaning. But this unit of meaning is so elastic and sensitive to context.
If meaning is always contextualized, then in retrospect, in the earliest of language, all words were like tabula rasa and meaningLESS. This is simply impossible. In other words, when words were first used, they had meaning per se. Discourse prosody, or semantic prosody only enables us to observe the meaning with more quantitative/probabilistic confidence.
So semantic prosody approach is not a final/facelift solution to lexical semantics.