SEMANTIC PROSODY OF THE LEMMA VACCINE IN THE MEDIA TEXTS

Abstract

This paper discusses the results of the corpus-based analysis of the semantic prosody of collocations with VACCINE in the broadsheet ‘The Guardian’. The corpus has been processed with the help of Sketch Engine. Text passages containing collocations with VACCINE have been interpreted in order to state the prosody mode of the collocation in the context. The study mostly pays attention to the nouns modified by VACCINE as most frequently used in the me­dia texts. The dictionary definition of VACCINE defines it as a word with positive semantic prosody. The discourse analysis demonstrates that collocations containing the lemma VACCINE can have positive, negative or neutral semantic colouring, which depends on the contextual meaning of the analyzed passage and which is also based on the semantic prosody mode of other words in the passage, which actually designates and presupposes the mode of the collocations in question. The nouns supply, safety, mask, uptake, access, protection, production, certification used in ‘The Guardian’ articles, having positive semantic prosody in the pattern noun + VACCINE, in general create a positive metaphorical image and defense from Covid-19. However, the nouns hesitancy, misinformation, avail­ability and skepticism possessing negative semantic prosody, are mostly used to describe people’s unwillingness to get vaccinated and their doubts about the effectiveness of the procedure. Collocations with type, mechanism, distribution, usage and VACCINE have a neutral semantic prosody, which shows that such collocations are used in text passages in the surrounding of neither positive nor negative words and the whole passage serves as a state­ment of some facts without being evaluated.

Key words: semantic prosody, corpus analysis, collocation, VACCINE, media discourse, The Guardian.