SEMANTIC PROSODY IN THE RUNAWAYS: A CORPUS-BASED INVESTIGATION OF POLITICAL DISCOURSE

Abstract

This study explores the use of semantic prosody in Fatima Bhutto's The Runaways to discover how language patterns contribute to the political and ideological discourse of the novel. Relying on the model of semantic patterning developed by Michaela Mahlberg, the analysis targets key terms, ideological words and lexical clusters with a corpus-based study of the text conducted with the software Lancbox X. These keywords and phrases serve as anchors around which themes of the text, such as identity, displacement, social control and ethical doubts, are intertwined; the study ascribes either positive or negative semantic prosody to them. A clearer understanding of the ideological thrust of the novel emerges from the analysis and reveals how Bhutto uses language to achieve it. The study concludes with the recommendation that the interplay between language and ideology can be understood better by applying semantic prosody and corpus stylistics to further literary texts.