Saturday 20 April 2013

Colligation and semantic prosody

If we take the clause " We all know about the benefits of " the word "all" here is used to postmodify "we". Presumably the speaker wants to gain support of the listener to assume some collective understanding of what follows. The semantic understanding is that everyone is in agreement.

If "all" is repositioned in this clause so it becomes " We know all about the benefits of "  then "all" postmodifies the verb to know. Then the implication is that the knowledge of the benefits is complete.

Also, if we reposition the word "all" so it becomes " All we know about the benefits of" it premodifies the verb to know again. However, now "all" has a different semantic meaning- it now means not alot.
 This appears to be a negative semantic prosody where a phrase acquires a new meaning.

The colligation of the word "all" seems to be what Sinclair summarises as " collocation and colligational patterns are meaning creating."

No comments:

Post a Comment