Análisis de los resultados del diagnóstico de la SGE 21:2008

Two notions from corpus linguistics might be particularly useful for improving our understanding of the functional properties of lexical bundles: semantic prosody and semantic preference. Sinclair (2004) explained the idea of semantic preference as “the restriction of regular co-occurrence to items which share a semantic feature” (p. 142). In other words, it refers to a given item’s tendency to find collocates in certain categories or sets of lexical items (e.g., Stubbs, 2001; Partington, 2004). For example, Stubbs (2001) observed that undergo is typically tied with categories of medicine, change, testing, and involuntariness, while Partington (2004)

found an association between maximizing adverbs such as totally, completely, and entirely with absence or a change of state. Semantic prosody is a related notion; it is defined as “a form of meaning which is established through the proximity of a consistent series of collocates,” expressing speaker/writer attitude or stance (Louw, 2000, p. 57). The role of semantic prosody has been explored in the past two decades by researchers including Sinclair (1991, 2004), Louw (1993), Stubbs (1995, 1996, 2002), Partington (2004), Hunston (2007, 2011), Morley and Parington (2009), and Stewart (2010), among many others. These studies have shown that the affective meaning of a given item is realized only when it is used in the context of its habitual collocations, often characterizable as positive, neutral, or negative (e.g., Stubbs, 1996; Xiao & McEnery, 2006; Oster, 2010). For instance, Louw (1993) listed several items that tend to be associated with unfavorable meanings, including utterly, bent on, symptomatic of, and victim of. Conklin and Schmitt (2008) pointed out others that, in contrast, are associated with positive connotations; they gave the example provide in provide information and provide services.

In sum, although semantic preference and semantic prosody describe distinct phenomena that differ in scope, they are also interdependent. While semantic prosody points to the semantic relations between a given item and its collocates, the scope of semantic preference is narrower, focusing on the relations among the collocates themselves (e.g., Stubbs, 2002; Partington, 2004). And while semantic prosody constrains the larger context in which an item can appear, semantic prosody itself is shaped by semantic preferences (Partington, 2004), as the semantic categories of collocates influence the affective meaning of the context.

While previous literature has reported interesting findings, several aspects of semantic preference and prosody remain unclear. First of all, much of the existing work has taken a top- down approach, in which the target words are predefined for the search and their collocations are

then investigated in a corpus (e.g., Sinclair, 1991; Louw, 1993; Stubbs, 1995, 2001; Hunston, 2002; Schmitt & Carter, 2004; Partington, 2004; Cheng, 2006; Xiao & McEnery, 2006). Hence, they target a small number of items chosen by the researchers, often focusing on explicitly value- laden words. Such items may be less relevant for academic prose, in which values or affective stances are expected to be expressed implicitly rather explicitly (e.g., Hunston, 1993; Gray & Biber, 2012). Furthermore, the scope of their analysis has been limited to the search for adjoining words, but semantic preference and prosody beyond collocational behavior are of great interest, especially when the analysis extends to how the target words denote meanings at the sentence- level, or even beyond the sentence, within the larger context. Another open question, which has been raised by several researchers, is whether attitudinal meanings of words identified in one context can be transferred to another. Hunston (2007) contends that such meanings are “register- specific” (p. 261); for example, the verb cause loses its typical negative connotation in scientific registers.

In this line of research, a study that does in fact address some of these issues was

conducted by Cortes and Hardy (2013). They took an inductive approach to explore the semantic preferences and prosodies of three phrasal LBs in two native corpora, one consisting of Spanish texts from Argentine journals and one consisting of English texts from American journals; both consisted of published research articles in the field of history. The study first identified lexical bundles in the two corpora, and selected equivalent pairs. The analysis of the bundles traced their referents and complements in context. The results showed the extent of the differences in

evaluative meanings and semantic categories of bundles across the two languages. For example, one of the most in both the English and the Spanish data was mostly used in positive contexts, to describe proper nouns as superlative; however, unlike the English data, the Spanish data included

no instances of a proper noun referring to women being depicted in this way, indicating the content of the published texts, which retell male-dominated events in the history of Argentina. This study is notable in its departure from previous work on semantic preference and prosody. The first important points of difference are that it employed a bottom-up corpus-based

methodology and analyzed the bundles that were retrieved from the corpus. In addition, their analysis focused on the relation of the bundles to their context; given that some core words in lexical bundles function as “empty shells” that enclose or anticipate the meaning of the

surrounding discourse (Aktas & Cortes, 2008, p. 4), the greater interest of LBs may be related to the co-occurring structures that combine with LBs in context, rather than the target bundles per se.

Overall, understanding the semantic prosody and preference of lexical bundles would help to understand how lexical bundles are involved in genre-specific conventions. The study of L2 use of multiword sequences is inextricably tied to the study of L2 acquisition of word co- occurrence; L2 vocabulary is learned cumulatively, through repeated encounters with a given word over time; competent speakers know what words co-occur in various contexts of use (Partington, 2004). Moreover, words’ semantic associations also develop cumulatively; thus, when language users frequently encounter a word in positive contexts, they come to associate that word with positive contexts; when a word occurs frequently in negative contexts, it takes on a negative association for speakers (e.g., Schmitt & Carter, 2004; Partington, 2004; Morley & Partington, 2009). Native speakers have longer histories with individual words, but also share more sociocultural associations; the greatest obstacle learners face in acquiring L2 vocabulary may be the lack of such associations (Moon, 1992; Morley & Partington, 2009). As Moon (1992), for instance, argued, the evaluative and textual functions understood among native

speakers make combinations of words the most challenging part of a language for L2 learners. An intriguing question to explore, then, is to what extent language learners, especially in EFL environments with limited exposure to input in the target language, use the habitual co- occurrence of words (Stubbs, 1996, p. 176), along with the properties of the words that are accessible to native speakers.

Hence, this dissertation, by comparing the use of LBs in relation to semantic prosody and preference in native and EFL academic production, will cast light on hitherto unexplored traits accumulated by the two language groups through their prior language experience and exposure (Belcher, 2014), and, in turn, would provide pedagogical implications for the instruction of formulaic language to different language groups of writers. For instance, the investigation of bundles in the argument essay register written (in response to the same prompts) by native and nonnative English-speaking university freshmen may show similarities and differences in how bundles are related to structural and functional properties in context as well as how argument and stance are realized in their writings. Tribble (2011) also argued for the need for a serious effort to investigate how novice academic writers employ lexical bundles in different stages of writing (e.g., in supporting their argument), and to what extent novice writers at different academic levels adhere to disciplinary conventions. Such research would contribute to answering genre enquiries in the realm of argument essays and thus provide useful information in regard to many factors related to the use of lexical bundles, providing useful pedagogical implications for teaching and learning argumentative writing at the university level.