Semantic prosody, also discourse prosody, describes the way in which certain seemingly neutral words can be perceived with positive or negative associations through frequent occurrences with particular collocations.
An example given by John Sinclair is the combination, set in, which has a negative prosody: rot is a prime example for what is going to set in.
Other well-known examples are cause, which is also used mostly in a negative context (accident, catastrophe, etc.), though one can also say that something "caused happiness"
(Stefanowitsch and Gries 2003).
In recent years, linguists ...