This paper (based on a presentation delivered at the 2012 PALA conference in Malta) aims to explain and illustrate the main principles of Contextual Prosodic Theory (CPT), developed by Bill Louw, the originator of the notion of semantic prosody (McEnery and Hardy, 2012: 135). No less importantly, it aims to free the theory from unwarranted criticism it has attracted over the past few years.
The paper presents a corpus stylistics view on empathy, seen as a mechanism of sharing textual meaning that subsists between authors and their readers. After a brief mention of the relevant developments in psychology and empirical stylistics, the paper focuses on the relevant research in the field of corpus linguistics. The paper shows that the semantic auras of grammar strings are consistent in the language and interact within a text. Thus in a poem, the subtext of the first line, obtainable through the most frequent lexical collocates of its underlying grammar string, may prospect the later developments within the poem by, for example, foreshadowing negativity or even violence. Empathy is thus seen as the sharing of the subliminal layers of meaning which a priori subsist in grammatical strings devoid of lexis, via their most frequent lexical collocates.
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