ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 considered two characteristics of semantic prosody (its evaluative quality and its hidden quality) which would appear to be common to all accounts of it. Chapter 3 examined features of relevance to diachrony and synchrony whose presence and emphasis vary substantially from one contribution to the next. The latter part of Chapter 3 concerned itself with the notion of meaning spreading and stretching across a unit or units, something which ties in directly with the question of the range of action of semantic prosody, i.e., how far can it ‘stretch’ and how large is the unit in question? With this in mind, in the current chapter I shall identify a further difference among studies on semantic prosody-the question of whether it characterises a longer sequence such as Sinclair’s unit of meaning, or whether it belongs to a unit which is no broader than the word.
