Local Semantic Prosodies and Their Discourse Management

The semantic prosody as the author or speaker's attitude and communicative purpose implied in lexical items is one of the necessary components of the Extended Unit of Meaning analysis.Focusing on the interrelationships between connotations and semantic prosodies as well as those between local semantic prosodies and their discourse management in an entire document, this paper has discovered that in an intratextual perspective of the entire document, the semantic prosody of a preceding lexical item is usually modified by later ones in the form of discourse management.It is also concluded that the semantic prosodies of the lexical items thus observed in an entire text of a given genre, domain or thematic focus are always of local and shifting properties and are therefore major distinctive characteristics of the meaning unit under examination.