Semantic prosodies

Semantic prosody--Meaning that extends from one word in a collocation to another, e.g. the word cause usually collocates with words denoting unpleasant things like difficulty, distress, trouble,and so on, and is therefore said to have a negative semantic prosody. Conversely, bring about, which collocates frequently with words like improvement, solution, success, and so on, is said to have a positive semantic prosody.

In some cases we might suggest that if there is any motivation at all, it is only to signal membership of a particular community by conforming to its customary idiom.

In other cases, a collocation may be explained by reference to general semantic principles.

These semantic prosodies can be said to be part of systemic knowledge. There are other collocational patterns that, like certain word frequencies as mentioned earlier, can be related to schematic knowledge in that they can be said to represent the way reality is conceptually constructed by a community of language users.

A comparison of concordances from the corpora of different newspapers, or of different domains of use altogether, might indicate degrees of schematic generality --- the extent to which the collocations reflect a particular or more general set of cultural assumptions.