【Abstract】Semantic prosody implies the speaker or writer’s stance and attitude towards certain entities or propositions. Using data-based approach， semantic prosodies of “incur” and “induce” are analyzed contrastively. Then， the semantic prosodic strengths of the two words are to be compared and contrasted.

【Key words】semantic prosody； incur； induce； data-based approach； semantic prosodic strength

I. Introduction

Semantic prosody studies the “extended units of meaning” （Tognini-Bonelli， 2001） and semantic coloring among word chunks， which can indicate that something is good or bad. Semantic prosody can be classified under three categories： positive， neutral or mixed， and negative prosody （Stubbs， 1996）. Semantic prosodic strength （Wei Li， 2014） is employed， which is a useful indicator to show the degrees of a certain category of semantic prosody for a node word.

Intuitively， “incur” and “induce” are considered to be unpleasant or bad. This paper is to identify which one is more “gloomy” and negative by analyzing the collocations with them in the corpus.

II. Research Method

The corpus BAWE （British Academic Written English） and retrieval tool AntCont3.2.2 are used. And data-based approach is conducted to study the colligations of the two words. The specific procedure is as follows： 1） Extracting concordance lines. 2） Establishing the colligations. 3） Collecting and classifying the collocates. 4） Analyzing and contrasting semantic prosody.

III. Semantic Prosodies of “incur” and “induce”

The observed frequency of “incur” in BAWE is 41. There’s only one meaning for this word from the concordance. 40 colligation of “incur” is “V + N”， and one is “V + N + to + V*”. All the collocates can be roughly classified into 3 different categories according to their semantics：

i. 22 out of 41 collocates of “incur” are the words connoting “cost”， “expenditure” or some ones alike.

ii. 11 out of 41 collocates are words about physical and emotional state or change.

iii. Other 8 collocates are involved with words or patterns from science and economic fields.

“incur” are more frequently used with words relating to financial loss and unfavorable physical or emotional state or change. It’s obvious that majority of the collocates （88%） are negative words， so “incur” has a negative prosody.

The observed frequency of “induce” in BAWE is 144. Three different meanings of “induce” are observed in the corpus： 1） “causing labour or birth” which is excluded in the analysis； 2） “persuade” and its colligation is “V + N + to + V*” whose frequency is 21 in BAWE； 3） “cause” and its colligation is “V + N” whose frequency is 122， and all its collocates can be classified into three distinct semantic categories：

i. 60 collocates are words from natural sciences. 30 out of them are something negative. 5 have a positive and favorable sense. Other 25 are neutral.

ii. 41 collocates are about economics or social science， 12 for negative， 10 for positive and 10 for neutral.

iii. 21 collocates are about physical or emotional state and change. 15 of them are negative； 3 are close to good； other 3 are neutral.

All in all， around 47% collocational words with “induce” have negative semantic coloring； 22% are positive or likeable words； and 31% are neutral. Thus， the semantic prosody of “induce” is negative.

IV. Conclusion

In sum， “induce” is much more frequently used than “incur”. “incur” is more often related to “causing financial loss”； while “induce” constantly appears in science and economic fields. Both “incur” and “induce” have a negative semantic prosody， but “incur” has a stronger negative prosodic strength than “induce”.

References：

[1]Naixing Wei，Xiaohong，Li.2014.Exploring semantic preference and semantic prosody across English and Chinese：Their roles for cross-linguistic equivalence.Corpus Linguistics and Ling.Theory.

[2]Stubbs，M.1996.Text and Corpus Analysis.Oxford：Blackwell Publishers.

[3]Tognini-Bonell，E.2001.Corpus Linguistics at Work.2Amsterdam and Philadelphia：John Benjamins.