Research on the Semantic Prosody of “Lockdown” based on Coronavirus Corpus

Abstract

Corpus linguistics has offered a unique perspective for the study of semantic prosody and the quite controversial practice of lockdown after the COVID-19 has provided researchers with a valuable chance to study the semantic prosody of this word lockdown. Based on the coronavirus corpus, this paper uses a data-driven approach to study the lexical collocation characteristics and semantic prosody of lockdown. The findings are as follows: (1) lockdown tends to collocate with words indicating time, country and region, cause, executive power and influence field. (2) Its semantic prosody as a whole presents a neutral to negative semantic prosody. Semantic prosody is also different in reports from different countries. (3) Based on the diachronic study, the semantic prosody of lockdown changes over time. Keywords: coronavirus corpus, lockdown, semantic prosody