May 1, 2023

Determining the 'voiceless' emotion in biblical words

By DALLE-2

Semantic Prosody pt. 1 - determining the 'voiceless' emotion in biblical words

Paradoxically, some words ring with a particular "voice" of emotion through nothing that the speaker does with their voice. These words are as "silent" and yet as evocative as the picture above. Researchers call this phenomenon "semantic prosody." This (longer than normal) newsletter introduces what semantic prosody is and why it is an important, but often missing, piece in translation.

Semantic Prosody

Semantic prosody is a positive or negative evaluation conventionally associated with a word because of the contexts in which it typically appears (cf. Sinclair 2004, 30-35). The word "prosody" may (rightly) lead those familiar with linguistics to conclude that the association comes from the intonation with which the word is uttered. The term does not indicate this, however. Rather, it indicates the otherwise silent emotional intonation that speakers perceive through awareness of the contexts in which the word typically appears.

From my research on the topic, I have found the following three traits key in distinguishing semantic prosody from other types of meaning and in determining whether a word's occurrence has a semantic prosody:

1. Semantic prosody is typically associated with terms that are propositionally "neutral" (Hauser and Schwartz 2016, 883). For example, both the following adverbs indicate a degree of completeness, which has no inherent emotional meaning, but one of them has a negative semantic prosody: totally and utterly (Hauser and Schwartz 2017, 11).
2. Researchers have noted that the semantic prosody of a word changes depending on its genre and register (Cheng 2013, 3). For example, the English verb cause often has a negative connotation in normal speech but a neutral one in scientific articles.
3. Semantic prosody may also be sensitive to the arguments involved (Hunston 2007, 263). Continuing with the example of cause above, the verb may have a more negative connotation when a person is the agent of the causing than when an inanimate object is the source.

English Examples of Semantic Prosody

Since semantic prosody has only been studied formally for such a short time, few quantitative studies exist on the topic. Those that do exist on the prosody of words in English have humorously predictable results.

What's the difference between caused and produced? When 405 participants in a study were asked to rate whether "X endocrination of abdominal lipid tissue" was positive or negative, they answered clearly (Schwarz and Hauser 2016). When the sentence began with "caused endocrination…", 72% of respondents answered that the sentence was negative; however, when the sentence began with produced, only 48% answered that it was negative.

What about the difference between totally and utterly? The researchers who conducted the first study conducted a follow-up study and found similar results (Schwarz and Hauser 2017). Respondents answered that a totally changed person was more likely to be warm and competent than an utterly changed person. Likewise, an utterly unconventional boss was held in lower esteem than a totally unconventional boss.

Significance of Semantic Prosody

Reading the results may be humorous for native speakers of English because we intuitively understand the particularities of these words, yet we likely have a poor ability to articulate these nuances. Our understanding comes from the net emotional meaning we associate with a word, derived from the emotional context of where the word has appeared through hundreds and thousands of times hearing and speaking it.

The semantic prosody associated with words guides the audience to form the same type of evaluations (Hauser and Schwartz 2017, 11). For example, a study in 1979 found that people had a positive view of a morally ambiguous character when the positive trait of assertiveness was discussed prior to the introduction of "Donald," a fellow who refuses to pay his landlord until his apartment is repainted (ibid). The semantic prosody of words "primes" audience members to view the following discourse in the same light, even when the audience would be likely to view the person in a skeptical light (ibid). The examples above in English demonstrate this phenomenon well. The audience was primed to see the boss in a negative light when utterly was used and in a positive light when totally was used.

History of Semantic Prosody and Biblical Scholarship

Humans have most likely been intuitively aware of the concept of semantic prosody for millennia, as witnessed by occasional comments in commentaries and dictionaries throughout the history of the study of biblical languages. Scholars didn’t study the concept systematically, however, until the 1990s, when Louw and Sinclair's work on meaning derived from a word's collocation birthed the formal study of semantic prosody (Jurko 2021, 188). The first researchers of semantic prosody (Louw, Sinclair, Stubbs) contended it is only accessible through large corpora and is otherwise nearly inaccessible to intuition, but more recent works, such as Stewart (2010), have challenged this notion (Cheng 2013, 5).

The rigorous study of semantic prosody has not made its way into the major New Testament Greek dictionaries (e.g. Silva 2014, Arndt et al. 2000, Louw and Nida 1996). The probable prosody of the biblical words is often perceptible from the translation choices for words and the examples used; however, because semantic prosody has not been studied systematically, translators have little assurance that the significant meaning it carries has been captured in the dictionaries.

Difficulty Translating Semantic Prosody

The meaning semantic prosody contributes makes it vital for the formation of impressions and the expression of emotions, but the way it contributes that meaning (through contextual associations) makes semantic prosody incredibly difficult to translate. An increasing number of researchers have turned their attention to the topic of translating semantic prosody (Rahbar and Elahi 2018; Lie and Wei 2020; Jurko 2021; see Jurko 2021 for a larger list). One study compared the semantic prosody between the some of the most common ADV + V pairs in Slovene and English (Jurko 2021). The author concluded that the best translation equivalents between the languages would still lack the emotional and evaluative connotations.

Sneak Peak on my Research

I have done the first analysis of a Koine Greek verb's prosody for each of its senses. What I found has changed how I interpret certain parts of the Bible. More than that, it has the potential to change how commentators talk about some important passages in the New Testament.

Stay tuned - a future newsletter will summarize my findings!

TL;DR

If the email was too long to read, here are the main points:

• Words carry the emotional overtones (semantic prosodies) of the contexts in which they most frequently appear.
• The English word caused has a more negative overtone than produced; likewise, the adverb utterly is more negative than totally.
• Semantic prosody was first studied systematically in the 1990s; its study has not (yet) influenced major New Testament Greek dictionaries.
• Quantitative studies have concluded that translating semantic prosody between languages is very difficult.
• I have done a study of one word's semantic prosody in the New Testament, and the results of my study could be influential.

Challenge for You

As you go about your day, think about the way words subtly influence how you perceive the events and people around you.

References

• Arndt, William, Frederick W. Danker, Walter Bauer, and F. Wilbur Gingrich. 2000. A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Cheng, Winnie. 2013. “Semantic Prosody.” In The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, 1–7. Oxford, England: Wiley-Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781405198431.wbea11062.
• Hauser, David J., and Norbert Schwarz. 2016. “Semantic Prosody and Judgment.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. 145 (7): 882–96. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000178.
• Hauser, David J., and Norbert Schwarz. 2017. “How Seemingly Innocuous Words Can Bias Judgment: Semantic Prosody and Impression Formation.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 75: 11–18. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.JESP.2017.10.012.
• Hunston, Susan. 2007. “Semantic Prosody Revisited.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 122 (June): 249–68. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.12.2.09hun.
• Jurko, Primož. 2021. “Semantic Prosody in Translation: Slovene and English ADV-V Combinations.” ELOPE: English Language Overseas Perspectives and Enquiries 18 (1): 187–209. https://doi.org/10.4312/elope.18.1.187-209.
• Li, Xiaohong, and Naixing Wei. 2020. “Exploring the Roles of Semantic Prosody and Semantic Preference for Achieving Cross-Language Equivalence: A Corpus-Based Contrastive Analysis of Translation Pairs in English and Chinese.” In Corpus-Based Translation and Interpreting Studies in Chinese Contexts: Present and Future, edited by Kaibao Hu and Kyung Hye Kim, 115–54. Palgrave Studies in Translating and Interpreting. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21440-1_5.
• Louw, Johannes P., and Eugene Albert Nida. 1996. Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament: Based on Semantic Domains. New York: United Bible Societies.
• Rahbar, Mohammad, and Ida Elahi. 2018. Semantic Prosody and Translation. LAP Lambert Academic Publishing.
• Silva, Moisés, ed. 2014. New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology and Exegesis Set. Second edition. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Academic.