Diachronic Study of Semantic Prosody in The Word “Happen”

The term “semantic prosody” has been started to research since the first observation of Sinclair in ۱۹۸۷. After Sinclair other linguists continued their studies on semantic prosody and to what extend semantic prosody effects on translation and language learning. Semantic prosody defined by Louw as a halo or profile among words and this halo would be a negative nor positive. Semantic prosody is a necessary notion of a word and as mentioned by Louw the semantic prosody of words can change over a period of time. this change can be analyzed in two ways of studies diachronically and synchronically. There are many types of research with a focus on the synchronic aspect of words but this study is an attempt to analyses the word “Happen” diachronically based on Louw’s definition of semantic prosody that clarified semantic prosody of a single word can change over periods of time. This study focuses in three recent decades with the news genre in the United States. The investigations show the effect of important events on the semantic prosody of the words. This study is based on corpus analysis design with the help of “COCA” corpora site.

Keywords:

semantic prosody , diachronic study , corpus analysis , happen