Semantic Prosody is the first full-length treatment of semantic prosody, a concept which has emerged almost exclusively within the field of corpus linguistics. The book offers a review of how semantic prosody has been described and approached in contributions on the subject, as well as a critical analysis of those contributions and a number of case studies. It discusses the relevance of the theory of priming for semantic prosody, and whether semantic prosody has cogency as a theoretical concept. Lastly, it points the way for future research.

Since work on semantic prosody so far has been occasional, brief, and distributed across a range of monographs, articles and conference papers, this book, which does not assume previous knowledge of the subject, will constitute a fundamental work of reference for scholars, teachers and students alike. At the same time, Semantic Prosody goes beyond the central topic of the work and proves to have wide-reaching implications for both corpus linguistics and linguistics overall. In this sense semantic prosody is used as a springboard for investigations into issues of vital importance for corpus studies such as the structuring and presentation of text in a corpus, the varying methodologies adopted by analysts to approach and interpret corpus data, as well as broader issues such as the role of intuition, introspection and elicitation in empirical language studies.