Mathias Skogly Russnes

• Russnes, Mathias (2025). Semantic prosody, categorisation and inter-rater reliability. Research Methods in Applied Linguistics. 4(3). doi: 10.1016/j.rmal.2025.100264. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This article investigates the inter-rater reliability of established methods of categorising semantic prosody. Semantic prosody is a concept associated with corpus linguistics, which describes the tendency of seemingly neutral items to occur in particular evaluative contexts. In previous research on semantic prosody, there has been a heavy reliance on manual analysis of smaller samples, and because of this, questions have been raised about the stability of the established methods for categorisation. Furthermore, there is also a lack of consensus regarding how such categorisations should be operationalised. Traditionally, it has often been viewed in binary terms, distinguishing between positive and negative prosodies. However, this restricted system has also received criticism, and certain researchers have adopted a more comprehensive (or fine-grained) categorisation, more connected to a unit’s semantic preference. This paper aims to evaluate the inter-analyst consistency of these systems through two experimental studies, in which four researchers independently analyse the same set of random concordance lines of the items habit and views from BNC2014, applying both methods of categorisation. The results indicate that a binary distinction between positive and negative offers a higher inter-analyst consistency than a more fine-grained categorisation. Additionally, this more comprehensive system was also found to obscure the borders between semantic preference and semantic prosody. However, because neither system achieved satisfactory inter-rater agreement, both studies highlight the need for more objective methods of analysing and categorising semantic prosody.

• Russnes, Mathias Skogly (2025). In and out of Possession: How Football Terms Can Illustrate the Connection Between Polysemy and the Register-Sensitivity of Semantic Prosody. English Studies: A Journal of English Language. ISSN 0013-838X. 106(8), p. 1320–1347. doi: 10.1080/0013838X.2025.2522210. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This article explores semantic prosody’s sensitivity to register. In previous research, the prosodies of units of meaning have been shown to vary across registers (Xiao and McEnery 2006; Hunston 2007; Ebeling 2021a), but this has generally not been viewed in connection with polysemy. This paper investigates this connection through a corpus study of the units in which the items possession, the edge of and penalty function as cores, inside and outside of a football context. The study compares material from the ENMaRC with data from the registers newspaper and fiction in the BNC2014, addressing the research question: to what extent is polysemy a contributing factor to the register-sensitivity of semantic prosody? Further, the study introduces a novel way of visualising collocation, inspired by atomic structures. The findings suggest that the register-specificity of prosody can be connected to the items’ separate senses, the semantic fields in which they are prevalent, and how these fields are distributed unequally across registers.

• Russnes, Mathias Skogly (2024). Semantic prosody, semantic transfer and semantic change. ICAME Journal. ISSN 0801-5775. 48(1), p. 67–88. doi: 10.2478/icame-2024-0004. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This article investigates semantic prosody in a diachronic perspective. Although prosodies have been shown to change over time, there is no consensus regarding the source of such changes. The present study explores this further through a corpus study of the development of the lemmas fabric, fabricate and fabrication from the late 15th century to the late 20th century, drawing on material from Early English Books Online, the Corpus of Late Modern English Texts and the British National Corpus. The results of the study show that prosodic changes coincide with the emergence of new senses and indicate that these processes are related to and possibly caused by semantic transfer induced by persistent prosodies over time.

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• Russnes, Mathias Skogly (2025). Categorising semantic prosody - from past discord to future consensus? Full text in Research Archive
• Russnes, Mathias Skogly (2024). Semantic prosody, register and polysemy. Full text in Research Archive
• Russnes, Mathias Skogly (2024). Register-specificity, polysemy and the atomic metaphor of extended units of meaning. Full text in Research Archive
• Russnes, Mathias Skogly (2023). Semantic transfer, semantic change and semantic prosody. Full text in Research Archive
• Russnes, Mathias Skogly (2023). The semantic prosodies of different senses of a word. Full text in Research Archive

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