Semantic preference and semantic prosody of the collocation make sense

Abstract: Semantic preference and semantic prosody are two notions that have been carefully analysed in corpus linguistics over the past few years. As corpora have become larger in size, and tools for extracting different lexical items for different purposes have been developed, the two terms have been addressed more frequently by linguists. Semantic preference can be defined as the relation between a word form and set of semantically related words, whereas the concept of semantic prosody of a given word or phrase occurs in the context of that particular lexical item with other words or phrases. This article reports on a study which analysed semantic preference and semantic prosody of one of the most common V-N collocations make sense. The environment of the collocation make sense is observed in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The procedure involves every second of the first randomly selected 100 occurrences of all the word forms of the collocation make sense i.e. make sense, makes sense, made sense and making sense. All the occurrences are manually examined and observed at the span of 10 words to the left and 10 words to the right and the results are compared.