Page "Semantic prosody" Paragraph 3

In recent years, linguists have found many hidden associations affecting the neutrality of language, through the use of corpus linguistics and concordancing software.

The software is used to arrange Key Words in Context from a corpus of several million words of naturally-occurring text.

The collocates can then be arranged alphabetically according to first or second word to the right or to the left.

Using such a method, Elena Tognini-Bonelli ( 2001 ) found that the word largely occurred more frequently with negative words or expressions, while broadly appeared more frequently with positive ones.

Lexicographers have often failed to allow for semantic prosody when defining a word, although with the recent development and increasing use of computers, the field of corpus linguistics is now being combined with that of lexicography.