Evaluative Prosody

Evaluative prosody can be defined from at least two standpoints. It is a process, the sharing, the spreading of evaluation beyond single word boundaries (the textual definition). Alternatively an item is said to have a particular evaluative prosody - positive or negative - if it co-occurs typically with other words of that polarity, if it typically partakes in arrays of items of that polarity. In particular it is applied to cases where this behaviour is not immediately obvious to the naked eye – or ear (the lexical definition). It exists because of the need for discourses to cohere evaluatively in order to avoid sending mixed, confusing messages regarding the speaker’s attitude to their topic. There may also be an aesthetic impulse to choose meanings which “sound well” together. Speakers / writer’s manage this cohesion naturally and effortlessly, because an intuitive knowledge of the prosodic potential - or primings - of items is an inherent part of their communicative competence. The techniques developed in corpus linguistics have without doubt permitted a more rigorous and more subtle analysis of the phenomenon than previously possible. And evaluative prosody has aroused such interest in the field of lexical grammar because it provides perhaps the strongest evidence ever uncovered that, in normal communication, lexical items are co-selected, one of the principal pillars of Sinclairian thought, and it indicates one of the strongest reasons why, namely, to fulfil speakers’ constant need and desire to express a consistent attitude to whatever is being conveyed.