What does it mean to be “utterly content”?: Semantic prosody impacts nuanced inferences beyond just valence.

Words have semantic prosody when they collocate with positive/negative concepts in natural language. Semantic prosody encourages positive/negative evaluations. However, it is unknown whether semantic prosody affects inferences of other attributes aside from positivity/negativity. Semantic prosody likely causes people to expect the valence of what comes next, and expectation violations occur when authors have ironic intent and when authors lack fluency with a language. Four studies investigated whether semantically prosodic expectations impact specific inferences about authors. Participants perceived a writer as having greater ironic intent when they posed a sentence with a semantically-prosodic word that mismatched with the valence of adjacent words (Studies 1, 3, & 4). Additionally, in line with English as foreign language pedagogy, the same manipulation caused participants to perceive a writer as being less fluent in English (Studies 2, 3, & 4). Thus, semantic prosody generates expectations, which impacts nuanced inferences.