an analysis of the connotation and semantic prosody of words in the semantic system and collocations of persian

the link between studies in discourse analysis and corpus linguistics has created new fields of research previously unattended. one of these areas is the study of semantic prosody produced through frequent collocation of a lexical item with a collection of words. semantic prosody is the positive, negative or neutral shade of meaning which a seemingly neutral word adopts after frequent collocation with positive, negative or neutral words. this is an important concept in corpus linguistics which has recently interested the linguists and attracted their attention. the present paper introduces this concept in persian for the first time, reviews its applications and provides examples in a corpus of persian texts. the theoretical framework of this study is based on the contributions of sinclair (1987) and louw (1993) and later studies following these two. a number of verbal complexes were searched in the internet in order to compile a corpus of persian sentences containing these verbs and their collocating words. the results indicated that statistically significant differences can be observed in the semantic prosody of these sample verbs, hence the realisation of semantic prosody patterns in persian collocations