A Comparative Study on the Semantic Prosody of Some Verb Compounds in Persian and English

The present paper is a corpus-based study of Persian comparing the results with those obtained in English. A seemingly neutral word may come to achieve a kind of positive or negative shade of meaning due to its frequent concurrence with positive or negative words. The phenomenon is called semantic prosody. The present study applies the findings of English studies and compares them with the semantic prosody of the Persian equivalents. Following the models proposed by Sinclair (1987) and Louw (1993)، the study works on a researcher-made 50- million-word corpus of randomly samples extracted from Iranian newspapers in a 5-year period. All the sentences containing the particular nodes were extracted and processed. The results indicated a patterning in the semantic prosody of Persian nodes similar to that of the English ones. Samples of the data from both languages together with their semantic prosody are presented.