语义韵是语料库语言学研究最具价值的成果之一,但也引起不少争议?文章重新审视语义韵,讨论了“传染说”?“转嫁说”?“极性两分法”等传统语义韵研究存在的问题,并重点讨论了语义韵的短语及语用属性?语义韵不是单词的属性,而是作为意义单位的短语的属性,语义韵会随着短语的变化而变化?语义韵的极性两分法是粗线条的,还 应当描写短语在不同语境中涌现出的语用评价功能?文章还提出了语篇语义韵的概念,并且认为搭配?扩展意义单位?语篇等不同层面的语义韵相互关联?最后文章指出了进一步研究语义韵需要解决的若干个问题?

The study of semantic prosody has become one of the important research topics in corpus linguistics, despite the fact that it has remained controversial. This paper aims to revisit the notion of semantic prosody, pinpointing some problems in the previous interpretation of semantic prosody, such as the views of “semantic imbuing”, “semantic transfer” and “a binary distinction between positive and negative”. It proceeds to discuss the phraseological and pragmatic property of semantic prosody. The following conclusions are drawn. Semantic prosody is not the property of a word, but of the phrase which functions as a unit of meaning. With the phrase changing in different contexts, the semantic prosody also changes. The concept that a word has a negative or positive semantic prosody is a simplistic view of attitudinal meaning, and the semantic prosody should be defined as detailed pragmatic functions of sequence in particular contexts. This paper also proposes the notion of discourse prosody, and assumes that the semantic prosodies at the level of collocation, extended unit of meaning and discourse interact with each other. Finally, this paper raises some research questions for the future research.