Paragraph Prosody

Language runs on vibes.

“A consistent aura of meaning with which a form is imbued by its collocates is […] semantic prosody. Semantic prosodies have been largely inaccessible to human intuition about language and they cannot be retrieved reliably through introspection. Evidence is emerging that departures in speech or writing from the expected profiles of semantic prosodies, if they are not intended as ironic, may mark the speaker’s real attitude even where s/he is at pains to conceal it.” (Bill Louw, Irony in the text or insincerity of the writer?)

Language runs on vibes. Sure, you can chop it up into paragraphs, sentences, clauses, words, even syllables or phonemes, but these are just there to bang against each other to generate reverberations so that we can feel the vibe. There are things in language that have boundaries, and things that float above the boundaries, like an aura emanating from the individual islands of form and merging into a single amorphous cloud. If we focus hard enough, we can discern the emanations from the individual locations, but when we stack them up, they don’t really add up to the overall vibe of the thing.

I’m using “vibe” on purpose, because dressing it up in official terms like prosody would not do justice to the extent of our inability, to say something definitive about this, but let’s look at prosody anyway. Prosody is what gives speech its contour - a combination of stress, rhythm, and intonation. We may speak about stress on a syllable or rise of a word, but that’s just a shortcut - necessitated by our need to write it down using some notation. The stress or the rise are not really in one particular spot, just somewhere near the syllable or the word. Syllables and words are the segments but prosody is suprasegmental - it’s obviously not independent of the segments, but it’s not perfectly matched to them. When you ask a question with a rise at the end, the whole sentence has the shape of a question - it’s not a statement until you decide it’s a question and suddenly raise the pitch of your voice at the end.

But the vibe of prosody is not just a matter of sound. It’s also clearly a matter of meaning. Words do not just add up their meanings, they make a shape - a shape that shimmers with a semantic aura. We feel the vibe, perceive the aura, but when we try to put a finger on them, they disappear and we are left with logical propositions. Sometimes the vibe of a word is obvious - “shrill” does not just refer to the volume of somebody’s voice. It’s about a woman speaking above her station. When we hear someone describe someone else as shrill, we know the gender of the speaker and the person he is speaking about without any other information. We don’t just know how loud she is speaking but also what she is talking about and what the speaker thinks about that. That is the vibe. But often the vibe is much less easy to identify. “Days” seems like such an innocuous neutral plural of “day” but it is used far more often in negative contexts - “those were the days”, “days of terror”, etc. You can say “we spent a day there” without any hint of what happened, but if you hear “we spent days there” you know there was some emotional charge to it - and it’s usually not good.

These resonances are what makes language actually work. They let us know what’s coming and incorporate the new and unexpected into what is old and comfortable. They are what allows instant insight. When John Sinclair mentioned “semantic prosody” to Bill Louw in 1988, Bill Louw didn’t have to think hard what he meant by it, he just knew instantly. The same way you don’t have to think very hard about which “he” refers to whom in that sentence. You get the vibe. “Semantic prosody” is a metaphor, a semantic parallel, “he” is a pronoun. And they are the subject for the next two days of writing.