[Corpora-List] My semantic prosody questionnaire

From: Irena Shuke (irenashuke@hotmail.com)
Date: Fri Jan 21 2005 - 23:22:02 MET

  • Next message: Przemek Kaszubski: "Re: [Corpora-List] My semantic prosody questionnaire"

    Dear all,

    I just received a questionnaire I had sent to England to be filled out by
    native speakers to see their awareness of semantic prosody. I knew (AND had
    been told) that it was best to just observe it in a corpus, but my aim was
    to see (compare) the difference between native and non-native speakers with
    respect to this. To test the intuitions of the both sides, so to say. (Well,
    I guess I did always want to see with my own eyes how native speakers would
    circle the "correct" sentence, such as 'She caused me a lot of trouble', and
    leave one like 'She caused me a lot of joy' alone.) Anyway, I thought a
    questionnaire given to both native and non-native speakers would show
    clearly the difference. First, I got them filled out by some of my fellow MA
    students (Linguistics, English Literature & ELT Methodology) who were all
    non-native speakers of English. Only one person scored enough for me to see
    she was showing consistent awareness of this phenomenon, but then, she and I
    had been discussing this, so I guess that doesn't count, although she had
    only been given one particular example ("cause") earlier in our discussions.
    (By "scored enough" I do not mean any particular percentage since I still
    have to decide how to best display my clever "findings".) A LOT of other
    respondents ticked off "Engineering of these goods will favourably affect
    the market" and "She caused me a lot of joy" as correct (acceptable, not
    "correct", but for some reason I tend to use the words "right/correct" and
    "wrong" when I think of it), or both the sentence that contained "caused me
    joy" and the one with "caused me trouble" in the same set, or ticked off
    "positively affect" and "favourably affect" but left out "seriously affect"
    and "badly affect" as unlikely. I decided to wait for the same questionnaire
    to come back from England where it would be administered to native speakers.
    I have to say that most of the sentences were either taken from a corpus AND
    modified or plain invented by me (esp. the provocative ones with the
    "unacceptable" collocations), because I didn't really want to underline the
    collocations that were to be thought about - so I decided to try to make all
    the sentences in one set look similar in form, so that only THE collocation
    would stand out in each of them by being the only different element. I did
    suspect that the respondents, esp. native speakers, might be put off by just
    any wrong collocation in a sentence before they even got to rejecting the
    sentence due to the clash of semantic prosodies. I also stated in the
    instructions that all of the sentences are correct grammatically. And before
    administering it to anyone at all, I had also shown the questionnaire to a
    tutor of mine just to make sure in general (she is a non-native speaker
    too).
    So I waited.

    Well, today I got 15 precious questionnaires from England. (Obviously it was
    not possible to get more in, but even these do illustrate something.)

    I looked at some of them and then double-checked the last "question" on each
    of them, i.e. 'Is English your mother tongue?' All said yes. Anyway, here
    are the results. 'She caused me a lot of trouble', 'She caused me a lot of
    misery', 'She caused me a lot of happiness', 'She caused me a lot of joy'
    are all ticked off as "likely to be used" in quite a few(!) people's
    responses. 'Engineering of these goods will favourably affect the market' -
    just fine in someone else's work. 'Caused me a lot of joy' - OK, but 'caused
    me a lot of happiness' - left out as "unlikely". I really don't know what to
    think. In some cases it might have been even ambiguity that I myself hadn't
    noticed, as in "Engineering of these goods will positively affect the
    market', which possibly might have been interpreted as "definitely". Yet,
    that is still not the only case. I myself really liked "cause" because it
    just seems very diagnostic to me, so I was hoping to see some consistency
    there. Alas.

    I am thinking now that perhaps it would make sense to put together a corpus
    of non-native students' works (for example) and see how they do or do not
    distinguish any semantic prosody patterns there, and of course there are a
    lot of corpora for researching native speakers' language.

    I really apologize if this seems outrageous, I do not mean to upset or
    disgust anyone. I guess I just had slightly different expectations (or
    hopes) of this experiment.
    I would be thankful for any opinions and input.

    Irena
    (MA Student of Linguistics, University of Latvia)

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