| dc.description.abstract | The aim of this thesis is to investigate to what extent the separate meanings of a lexical unit can affect its semantic prosody. Semantic prosody has become an established concept within the field of corpus linguistics, but in previous research preformed, lexical items have predominantly been treated as monosemous. This thesis challenges the traditional view of semantic prosody and aims to display that, in certain cases, homonymy needs to be taken into account to establish semantic prosody of lexical items. To accomplish this, a corpus study is performed of the verb lemmas CAUSE, COMMIT, and HAPPEN, where each meaning is analysed after Sinclair’s model of determining extended units, drawing on material gathered from the British National Corpus, to answer the research question: To what extent is a word’s meaning decisive for the semantic prosody of lexical units? Further, this thesis has four underlying hypotheses, namely (1) Specific lexical meanings of items can be triggering factors and should be taken into account when determining semantic prosody, (2) in certain cases, it might be more precise to treat these meanings as homonyms with separate semantic prosodies, (3) the hidden quality of semantic prosody might in part be attributed to the different prosodies of the separate meanings of the same lexical item, and (4) for certain specific meanings within a lexical item found to have a particular semantic prosody, it might be more precise to ascribe a positive or negative connotational meaning. The results of the study performed demonstrate that separate meanings of the same lexical item can differ markedly in terms of prosody, and that this difference is apparent in the distinctly separate collocational and colligational patterns, as well as in their semantic preference and environment they occur in. Finally, this thesis discusses debated aspects of the concept of semantic prosody, in addition to investigating how the findings from the study can contribute to the general discussion of semantic prosody, and argues that there are individual differences, both between the lemmas studied and within the lemmas. | eng |