Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Applied Corpus Linguistics, cilt.6, sa.1, 2026 (ESCI, Scopus)
Speakers may utilize grammatical, lexical, or syntactic resources at the discourse level to encode attitudes. From the perspective of Appraisal Theory, such an attitude includes emotional reactions, judgments, and evaluations. This study investigates how semantic prosody, a linguistic resource that generates attitudinal meaning, influences the processing of synonyms. To achieve this end, lexical priming and lexical decision tasks were conducted with 39 participants using a within–subject design. In the lexical priming task, semantic prosody was found to have a priming effect on the recognition of synonyms that are compatible with its own semantic prosody. In the lexical decision task, semantic prosody was found to shorten reaction times in the recognition of word units that were consistent with their own semantic prosody. The findings indicate that, in addition to emotion–laden words, which explicitly, metaphorically, or attitudinally signal attitudes, semantic prosody also acquires attitudinal meaning, contributing to processing. This attitudinal function of semantic prosody indicates that, as a result of associative learning, it acquires selective attention through frequent and consistent usage, thereby generating an automatized response. The attitudinal relationship that semantic prosody establishes with collocations in the text has been discussed in terms of how and why it affects the processing of words, and the underlying acquisitional processes have been described. As the first study to investigate the processing of Turkish synonyms with different semantic prosodies, this research is expected to provide a basis for further research.