How to Write Effortlessly Lyrical prose with Semantic prosody
Before we get into the tutorial, I’ll break down the term ‘semantic prosody’ itself so that you can have a foundational understanding of the tool before we build upon it.
Semantics
The interpretation of signs and meaning, especially within linguistics and philosophy.
An example of this is slang, certain contractions, and dialects, all of which use unique cultural words to alter the base language and require the listener to interpret the words. Metaphors are also a form of semantics; they require the listener to interpret the meaning of an analogy.
There are three different types of semantics.
Lexical semantics focuses on the contextual relationship words have with each other. This is what we’re focusing on.
Example: ‘Read’ and ‘book’ are semantically linked.
Formal semantics uses mathematics and logic to study the meaning of language.
Conceptual semantics uses philosophy to study the relationship between thought and words.
Prosody
The rhythm and musicality of prose or poetry.
This word usually employs the above definition, but it’s used within this this term in a phonological sense. In phonology (the study of speech sounds), a prosodic feature is a sound quality that colors the sounds around it.
Example: the nasal quality of the word ‘man’ causes the vowel to sound more nasal than it would within other words like ‘application’.
Semantic Prosody
The use of word context to affect meaning.
This combines the two concepts by using semantics to subliminally change the meaning of what it being said.
To demonstrate what I mean, let’s say that I want to imply that a man named Elliot is being unfaithful to his wife with a woman named Sophia.
Example without semantic prosody: “Before she had the chance to leave, Elliot roped Sophia into one more drink.”
Example with semantic prosody: “Elliot caught Sophia’s eye before she left, and they had one more drink.”
We accomplish this by using collocates, which are words that are statistically likely to appear next to a keyword. These can be found by looking through an English corpus search engine. (I’ll link one in the Further Reading section below)
Example: Collocates for with the word ‘dread’ are sense, mix, spine, and twist.
I visualize this in the form of deciding which paint color (word) will produce the desired level of contrast in my painting (the sentence). In order to achieve that contrast, I have to understand how that color will oppose or blend in with the other colors around it.
How It Affects Your Prose
There are three different types of semantic prosody: negative, positive, and neutral. That means every keyword either inspires positive or negative association in the reader’s mind. This effect is referred to as ‘connotation’ or colloquially as an ‘aura’.
However, collocations don’t have to be one hundred percent negative/positive to qualify the keyword as negative/positive, they just have to sway to one side by about seventy percent. This isn’t an exact science, but usually looking at the top twenty collocates will reveal a distinct connotation.
Negative Example: the word ‘red’ is most often seen with these types of words: blood, hot, shame, anger, fire, iron, etc. These are most often associated with negative connotations, therefore red has negative prosody.
Positive Example: the word ‘tree’ is most often seen with these types of words: Christmas, apple, big, family, oak, trunk, etc. These are usually positive or neutral connotations and none of them are negative, so ‘tree’ is positive.
Neutral Example #1: The word ‘experience’ is most often associated with words like: pain, joy, trauma, success, symptoms, thrill, etc. As you can see, there’s a pretty equal divide between negative and positive, and so the word is neutral.
Neutral Example #2: The word ‘situation’ is a noun that requires other words to give it meaning, and therefore it’s neutral. Other examples of this are ability, access, study, and research. These are called ‘shell nouns’, and obviously tend to lean latinate/academic.
So, if you’re writing a clause/sentence that needs to have a positive implication, but you’re using negative prosody words, that’s going to create a reader-writer disconnect. However, every word will have both negative and positive synonyms (neutral is a bit harder to come by), which allow you to write the same clause/sentence with different connotations. To demonstrate, here are two versions of the opening lines of Beloved by Toni Morrison. The first example features the original lines, and below it is my awkward-prosody version.
124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims.
124 was feisty. Congested with a kid’s temper. The ladies in the home pondered it and so did the youngsters. For years each engaged with the frustration in their own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its direct targets.
How to Use It
Everyone uses prosody differently, so I’ll go over some effects that I enjoy and the methods you can use to achieve them. This will give you a foundation to experiment with.
Subliminal Foreshadowing
This is a method used by literary authors to inject a specific tone into seemingly innocent scenes to subliminally foreshadow future events. This especially helps maintain a specific mood when reading through neutral scenes.
To demonstrate, let’s say that I’m writing a novel about a house that’s haunted by a demon, and I want to start the novel with a scene that depicts a kid moving into the house before their whole family gets murdered. In order to foreshadow the imminent deaths, I’ll inject the opening scene with collocates of murder, gruesome, blood, and other similar words.
Without: “Lily didn’t like the house from the start. The paint was an ugly faded yellow and the lawn was patchy where neighborhood dogs had peed on it. But, more concerningly, she disliked looking into the empty black windows for fear that something might be looking back at her.”
With: “Lily hated the house from the start. The paint was a cold grisly yellow and the lawn was clotted and dead where neighborhood dogs had peed on it. But, most concerningly, she couldn’t confront the empty black windows for fear that something might be staring back at her.”
Characterization
You can create character depth by injecting their dialogue or POV narration with prosody that contradicts what they are saying, thus revealing subtle clues that point at what their true motivations/emotions are.
To demonstrate, I’ll come up with a piece of first person narration. A woman is sitting across from a therapist who makes her uncomfortable. However, she has a history of delusions, therefore she’s unsure if she really had the right to feel uncomfortable. To accomplish this, I’ll litter the text with collocates of content, happy, carefree, and similar words.
The scent of David’s summery cologne drifts across the desk while he waits for me to respond. His smile is serene and buoyant, hands gently folded. Under the door, my eye follows the shadows of people passing by at painfully casual paces, unaware of the scene behind the door, living their contented lives. Someone distantly laughs. Following my gaze, he reminds me that the room is soundproof and secured by the remote lock under his desk. Nobody can overhear or barge in on us, he says, still smiling. We stare at each other in silence.
Unreliable Narrator Dissonance
You can hint at/deepen a narrator’s unreliability by always framing something with negative or positive prosody. Examples include:
A main character/narrator that only uses positive prosody in reference to a woman he’s ‘investigating’ and negative prosody for everyone else, subliminally setting up the twist reveal about him being her stalker.
A main character with massive self esteem issues could use negative prosody solely when referring to themselves and positive/neutral prosody when discussing everyone else.
A main character with amnesia could subconsciously use collocates associated with abuse when talking about the person who inflicted their mysterious brain injury.
Hinting at a Lie
You can use dissonant prosody to make it feel like someone is lying, despite having a perfect alibi. I’ll write two versions of the same alibi to demonstrate this. One will use positive prosody and the other will use negative. It’s really subtle, but especially effective if you want to mislead the reader.
P: “You can have a chat with Sheryl over at the Mountain View Inn; she was finishing up the books while I oversaw the desk. We were blabbing the whole evening.”
N: “You can call Sheryl down at the Mountain View Inn; she was doing the books while I worked the desk. We talked all night.”
Satirical Irony
Similar to the characterization methodology, you can create ironic dissonance between subject matter and the narrator’s voice by using collocates that oppose the subject matter. This is most often used in satirical comedy, but’s also effective in other genres:
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley uses sincerely warm and optimistic language to narrate a distinctly dystopian novel, reflecting a society that pleasures itself into misery.
The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin uses the stereotypically pleasant and domestic prosody of idyllic 1950’s housewives to create a suffocating, surreal atmosphere that feels exceptionally uncanny and oppressive.
The Lottery by Shirley Jackson uses a pleasant, even at times cheerful, prosody to contrast the mystery of what the lottery entails. This, in my opinion, is the most potent reason that people don’t usually predict the ending. However, even if you do predict it, the dissonant prosody always makes you feel like you have to stay for the inevitable.
Further Reading and Tools
This is a great article about prosody by Frank Boutsen, who holds a PhD in Communication Disorders and two Master’s degrees in Psychology and Speech and Language Pathology. It’s definitely a bit academic and dry, but it goes into a lot of detail about the science and psychology behind prosody.
This is a more in-depth but brief overview of semantics written by English professor Karim Nazari Bagha. Thankfully a tad more colloquial than most academic papers.
This is an article about Phrasal Stress by Hubert Truckenbrodt, who holds a PhD in Linguistics from MIT. Also very dry, but exceptionally informative.
This is the Corpus of Contemporary English, created by Mark Davies. It’s the gold standard when looking for collocates or doing any other linguistics work because it contains more than one billion words sampled from 1999-2019. The corpus references eight ‘genres’ of language: spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, academic texts, TV, movie subtitles, blogs, and other webpages. This is the guide to reading the results. There is a free version of it, but your queries are limited without a subscription.
This is a collocation search site. It’s not as exhaustive as COCA, but it doesn’t require you to make an account/subscribe and it’s not as complicated to use.
You can also use a completely free software tool called AntConc as an alternative to COCA. You can compile and upload a corpus reference and compare your own writing samples to it with a variety of tools, including a collocate finder. It’s an exceptionally useful tool, but it does take a little while to learn how to use it because it’s generally used in academic settings, so the UI isn’t exactly intuitive. However, there are a lot of great tutorials online.
