Semantic prosody is a concept that has been subject to considerable criticism and debate. One big concern is to what extent semantic prosody is domain or register-related. Previous studies reach the agreement that CAUSE has an overwhelmingly negative meaning in general English. Its semantic prosody remains controversial in academic writing,…

This study investigates "of"-constructions in the predicates of two reporting verbs, "demonstrate" and "show," in academic discourse. A construction perspective is taken to examine how the two predicate constructions (["demonstrate" N1 "of" N2] and ["show" N1 "of" N2]) would…

The dominance of syntactic studies in linguistics has caused lexis and grammar to be perceived as two distinct categories. With introduction of the paradigm of cognitive linguistics, the studies in syntax have been replaced by those in lexis and concepts. Semantics has come to the fore through the studies in cognitive linguistics, and there has…

This study investigates the phraseological patterning that occurs in reporting clauses used to make references to others' research. It examines finite reporting clauses with "that"-clause complement and draws upon two corpora of theses written by native speakers in contrasting disciplines: approximately 190,000 words in politics/international…