semantic prosody and collocational profile in - ICHS/UFOP

ANAIS DO X ENCONTRO NACIONAL DE TRADUTORES & IV ENCONTRO INTERNACIONAL DE 

TRADUTORES (ABRAPT-UFOP, Ouro Preto, de 7 a 10 de setembro de 2009) 

Semantic prosody and collocational profile 

in “The black cat” and “O gato preto” 

Fernando da Silva 

Maria Lúcia Vasconcellos 

Lincoln Paulo Fernandes 

(Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina) 

“He who stays near vermillion gets stained red, 

and he who stays near ink gets stained black” 

Old Chinese saying 

Abstract: Semantic prosody (SP) is a type of lexical pattern that indicates 

an evaluative or pragmatic sense which a part of a text assumes in the 

presence and co-occurrence of certain specific lexical items. The concept 

of semantic prosody comes from the idea that the sense of a certain 

lexical item extends to a broader part of the text, tainting the context 

around it (Berber Sardinha, 2002). The notion that words associate to 

collocates and that those collocates are inter-related according to the preestablished 

standards of a language or according to criteria of negative or 

positive connotation is central to understand the evaluative sense that is 

behind the concept of semantic prosody. In this context, this study intends 

to explore the potential of this category of meaning for revealing patterns 

in language by means of the investigation of the construction of a 

character in a short story by Poe (1843), “The black cat”, translated into 

Brazilian Portuguese as “O gato preto” (1965), by Oscar Mendes, which 

compose the Small-Scale Bilingual Parallel Corpus of the investigation. 

The methodological apparatus is based upon the premises of corpus 

methodologies – Corpus-Based Translation Studies (CTS) – and involves 

the use of the software WordSmith Tools for data extraction and 

manipulation. The analysis of the data thus collected is informed by the 

notion of SP both in the investigation of the Source Text (ST) and of the 

Target Text (TT). The results of the study indicate that SP proved to be a 

useful concept to inform the investigation of the construction of a 

character helping to build its Collocational Profile as regards its 

collocates. 

Key words: Corpus-Based Translation Studies (CTS); Semantic Prosody 

(SP); Collocational Profile; Connotation; The Black Cat/O Gato Preto. 

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1 Introduction 

1.1 Initial remarks 

This piece of research is carried out in the area of Translation 

Studies (TS) known as Corpus-based Translation Studies (CTS). Within 

this framework, it draws specifically on the notion of semantic prosody 

(SP), to describe the construction of a character in a short story by Poe 

(1843), “The black cat”, translated into Brazilian Portuguese as “O gato 

preto” (1965), by Oscar Mendes, which compose the Small-Scale 

Bilingual Parallel Corpus of the investigation. The study aims at 

describing “the consistent aura of meaning with which a form is imbued 

by its collocates” (Louw, 1993, p. 157) that indicates an evaluative or 

pragmatic sense that a lexical item assumes in consequence of the 

presence and co-occurrence of other lexical items. The selection of this 

specific notion is related to the fact that by means of the observation of 

semantic prosodic patterns and collocational profile it is possible to 

describe the construction of a character throughout a short story in terms 

of the evaluative representation as manifested in the narrative. In this 

specific case, the “character” whose construction is being observed and 

described is the “cat” itself, here taken to be the protagonist of the short 

story. One of the main features of this character is the fact that its 

representation changes as the tale unfolds in consonance with changes 

occurring in its owner 1 . In this context, the hypothesis informing this 

research is that it is possible to trace the cat’s representation as the story 

unfolds by looking at the semantic prosodies and collocational profile 

related to this lexical item, here referred to as “node”, to use the term of 

corpus methodologies (Louw, 1993). From this initial hypothesis, there 

emerge the following Research Questions (RQs). 

(i) Is the SP in both texts an indication of the way “the cat” is 

perceived and represented/constructed? 

(ii) What collocational profile emerges from the prosodic analysis 

of the node? 

(iii) Do the stylistic choices as manifested in the SP patterns in 

the ST reflect the same semantic load in the story rendered in 

the TT? 

1 Dávila-Montes. Available at: . Access on 

10 nov. 2011. 

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1.2 Context of investigation 

This study is a replication of a previous study carried out in 

Spanish by José Manuel Dávila-Montes, published in “Poe Translated by 

Cortázar” 2 , in which the author showed the evidence of the semantic 

prosody in the word “cat/gato” and concepts referring to them, as well as 

the empirical evidence of “usefulness of corpora methodology applied 

within language contrastive studies and translation” as he mentions in 

his work. Dávila-Montes’s study differs from the present research, 

however, in that while the former investigates semantic prosody at work 

in the language pair English-Spanish, in the short story “The black cat” 

and its translation into Spanish (1973), “El gato negro”, the present study 

explores the language pair English-Portuguese, in the translational 

relation between “The black cat” and “ O gato preto”. The relevance of 

the study can be claimed in terms of the application of the concept of 

semantic prosody to new data so as to confirm (or disconfirm) the validity 

of this framework to discursive translation studies. 

2 Review of literature 

The concept of SP is now presented with a view to characterizing 

its semantic nature when related to its collocates or certain semantic 

environments, tracing the terminology used to refer to this concept and 

pointing out its contribution to TS. Also referred to as discourse prosody, 

SP relates to supra-segmental features of discourse, conveying 

paralinguistic information such as irony, humor, sarcasm, ambiguity, etc. 

(Louw, 1993). According to Louw (1993), the scholar responsible for 

coining this term, “the consistent aura of meaning with which a form is 

imbued by its collocates is referred to as semantic prosody” (italics 

added). Louw (1993) attempts to explore the diagnostic capacity of 

semantic prosody and the role it plays in composing and grading 

persuasive language in adds, for example, as suggested in the same 

article. SP is a type of meaning that indicates an evaluative or pragmatic 

sense that a specific part of the text acquires in consequence of the 

presence and co-occurrence of certain specific lexical items. The 

concept of semantic prosody, according to Berber Sardinha (2002), 

2 Available at: . Access on: 10 nov. 2011. 

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comes from the idea that the sense of a certain lexical item extends to a 

broader part of the text, tainting the context around it. Partington (1998 

apud Berber Sardinha, 2002) states that the sense of semantic choices 

depends on and reflects the various levels of the language. That is to 

say, the choices at word level depend on the choice of the context to 

which they are related. This context may comprehend patterns of cooccurrence, 

and these types of patterns can affect a larger stretch of the 

text, changing and modulating its sense. The study of SP is not restricted 

to the description of the word itself, but to the broader context that is part 

of it, to the choices that relate to a specific lexical item, and the various 

levels that compose a language system. In this sense, SP can be 

described as “a form of meaning which is established through the 

proximity of a consistent series of collocates” (Louw, 2000 apud Xiao 

and McEnery, 2006). SP refers to the recurrent association between 

lexical items in a semantic field, indicating a certain connotation, positive, 

negative or neutral, or a certain evaluative characteristic, says Berber 

Sardinha (2002). According to the same author, the understanding of the 

concept of semantic prosody is important for translation because it 

carries a meaning that is not made explicit in dictionaries. The 

systematic analysis of translation through the concept of SP can shed 

light on questions related to adequacy and equivalence: although the 

study of SP is not predominantly a contrastive or a translated-related 

type of study, the perception of this aspect of meaning brings an 

important contribution to contrasting different languages, especially when 

directly related to a specific language pair as is the purpose of this 

article. 

According to Louw (1993, p. 173), “semantic prosodies have in 

large measure and for thousands years remained hidden from our 

perception and inaccessible to our intuition.” Thus to look at SP implies 

using corpus methodologies as this type of meaning is “largely 

inaccessible to human intuition”, and which then requires the refinement 

of computer based methodologies (Louw, 1993, p. 157). It was only with 

the refinement of corpus methodologies and subsequently development 

of computer-based techniques that this phenomenon emerged as a 

fundamental segment of discourse. 

The notion of SP stems from a corpus-based approach within an 

expressive and evaluative perspective on collocation, taking into account 

the hypothesis that certain lexical items tend to occur in the company of 

words or phrases which carry a predominantly positive or negative sense 

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in their orientation (Hampe, 2005). Such characteristic makes of 

semantic prosody and prosody highly contextual entities of meaning. 

SP is closely related to the notion of collocation, systematized by 

Sinclair in 1991 to refer to the tendency of certain words to occur with 

certain grammatical choices or certain semantic environments. In this 

sense, it is possible to say that he gets close to explicitating the 

phenomenon of semantic prosody when, for example, the fact that 

certain words show the tendency to occur in a certain semantic 

environment, for instance, the verb “to happen” which he describes as 

being predominantly associated to unpleasant events. Another famous 

example – later on replicated in the study of Berber Sardinha (2002) in 

Portuguese – is the phrasal verb “to set in”, which by means of a corpus 

approach was seen to possess an equally predominant ability to occur 

with words related to unpleasant events. 

Another characteristic of the SP of a certain node is its capability 

of changing its polarity according to transitivity. For instance, the verb to 

build up when used transitively, as in build up organizations, better 

understanding, etc, acquires a uniformly good prosody. When collocated 

with forces or things, such as cholesterol, toxins, armaments as in an 

intransitive form, as in to toxins build up, it acquires an uniformly bad 

prosody (Louw, 1993, p. 171). 

The importance of contrasting collocational behavior and SP 

becomes evident when dealing with language pairs – which is the case 

in TS. The main question that arises from this is the extent to which the 

evidence of SP and prosodic features help word recognition in 

translation. According to Berber Sardinha (2002), SP is important for the 

understanding of translation because although the isolated word carries 

an important meaning, this meaning is changed when seen in company 

of equivalent collocations for that specific word in the target language. In 

this sense, a translator may produce an inappropriate SP without being 

aware of it. In this sense, if the translator is not familiar with the concept 

of semantic prosody and its overall effect on translation, s/he may 

produce oddities in the translated text. In this sense, says Berber 

Sardinha (2002), the study of collocates and SP, especially regarding 

two languages, may throw light on questions of adequacy of equivalent 

lexical items. 

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3 Method: corpus and analytical procedures 

This subsection is briefly discusses the contribution of corpusbased 

methodologies; presents the purpose of the corpus creation; the 

type of corpus under study; the process of corpus building and of corpus 

processing; the delimitation of the object of analysis/node as well as the 

analytical procedures guiding the study. 

The reflections made by Olohan (2004) and the methodological 

apparatus proposed by Fernandes (2004), in his unpublished PhD work 

(PGI – UFSC), inform the corpus methodology of this study, which is 

subdivided into: (i) purpose of corpus creation; (ii) type of corpus; (iii) 

corpus building; (iv) corpus processing; (iv) delimitation of the object of 

analysis; (v) delimitation of the node of analysis. 

The purpose of creating the present corpus was to investigate 

whether or not the SP and collocational patterns observed in a short 

story originally written in English is present in the Brazilian Portuguese 

rendering of the same tale. More specifically, it is hypothesized that as 

“the word choice parallels very accurately the process of demonization of 

the cat by the storyteller” 3 the same parallelism occurs in the TT: based 

on a collocational perspective, the process of demonization of the 

protagonist of the short story is reflected in the semantic prosody of the 

lexical items referring to “the cat” (“cat”, “beast”, “animal”, “Pluto”, 

“creature”, “monster”, “pet”, “playmate”, “it”) and “o gato” (“gato”, “besta”, 

“animal”, “Plutão”, “criatura”, “monstro”, “animal de estimação”, 

“companheiro”, “ele”). 

As for the type of corpus in this study, its definition is based on 

criteria suggested by Fernandes (2204), according to which a parallel 

corpus is usually classified according to four parameters: 

(i) Number of languages: bilingual, trilingual or multilingual if 

more than three languages represented; 

(ii) Temporal restriction: synchronic – when the object of study 

focuses a specific period of time, or diachronic – when the 

object of study is concerned with the historical development 

of the object of study throughout a period of time; 

(iii) Directionality: unidirectional, when it focuses on just one 

direction of translation (English rendered into Brazilian 

Portuguese); bidirectional, when composed by L1 texts and 


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its translation into L2 plus the original text in L2 and its 

translation into L1; and multidirectional, when more than two 

languages are involved and the translation analysis does not 

revolve around L1, but around the interaction of the 

languages that make up the corpus. 

The type of corpus on which this study is based can be classified 

as a bilingual, synchronic, specialized, and unidirectional parallel corpus. 

In addition, it is a small-scale corpus, in contrast with large scale 

corpora, both in terms of size and methodological terms. Corpus building 

in the present research is divided into three stages: downloading and 

proof reading of ST and TT; editing and formatting; annotating. The first 

stage consisted in downloading the texts through the Internet, since the 

short stories to be analyzed were already part of public record. The texts 

were edited and converted to .txt format and encoded according to the 

norms required by the software Wordsmith Tools. The next step was to 

run the texts through a concordance program, which generated the lists 

of occurrences of the nodes to be analyzed. 

As regards the delimitation of the object of analysis, in a first 

moment only the lexical items “cat” and “gato” were looked at as they 

were expected to provide a clear description on how semantic prosody 

operates within the construction of the character. As that proved 

insufficient, the procedure proposed by Dávila-Montes 4 was followed, 

which meant including the lexical items “cat”/“gato”, “beast”/“besta”, 

“animal”/”animal”, “Pluto”/“Plutão”, “creature/criatura”, monster”/“monstro, 

“pet”/“animal de estimação”, “playmate”/”companheiro” and “it”/“ele”, so 

as to trace evidences of the process of demonization in the figure of the 

“cat” in the short stories. Such lexical items were analyzed for 

collocational profiling and SP description. 

4 Description and analysis 

4.1 Global statistics: general information on data 

The comparative and analytical investigation of both texts resulting 

from the observation of the statistics of their wordlists shows a relative 

difference in what concerns the analysis of the products provided by the 


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observation of the collocates and their respective word choices. 

Regarding this specific aspect of both texts, the simple comparison of 

statistical results from both texts’ wordlists indicates small differences 

regarding the number of tokens and types 1, type/token ratio2, 

sentences, sentence length, standardized type/token ratio3 and 

paragraph length. Figure 1 illustrates the comparison of the data 

obtained between the ST and its translated version. Column 1 refers to 

the overall data of both texts, being column 2, (THEBLA~1.TXT) referred 

to the source text, and column 2 (OGATOP~2.TXT) referred to the target 

text. 

Figure 1: Global statistics generated 

For purposes of correct alignment, the number of paragraphs in 

the TT was modified in order to match the number of paragraphs in the 

ST. In the overall, the average paragraph length was similar in both 

texts. From a general overview of the analysis of both texts, the data 

generated display a certain redistribution of concepts throughout the text, 

that is to say, as the tales unfold, the terms “cat”/“gato” are replaced with 

new representations in order to convey the way the cat is portrayed in 

the story. This evidence is clearly shown by means of the data collected 

through Wordsmith Tools, considering the redistribution of concepts 

within the texts, and by means of the comparative analysis of their word 

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lists as follows in the next section. Still, by viewing the collocational 

patterns related to the nodes of analysis, the overall tendency evidenced 

is the denomination of the “cat”/“gato” with concepts that reflect the 

stylistics of a horror story. 

4.2 Data generated by Wordsmith Tools 

From the investigation of the wordlists of both texts obtained it 

becomes evident that the TT differs form the ST in the aspects 

presented in Table 2. It is worth observing the redistribution of concepts 

throughout the texts. 

Table 2: Data Generated by Wordsmith Tools 

The text presents one occurrence of “pet” being translated as 

“bicho” three times, and once replacing the concept “creature”. Also 

forty, out of the seventy occurrences of “it” within the T, were directly 

referring to the figure of the “cat”, the rest referred either to other 

concepts such as the corpse of the wife, for example, or “it” was used 

due to the syntax of English that does not allow the use of a verb without 

an subject. The texts present a tendency towards redistribution of 

concepts. For example, as follows below, the extracts show an instance 

of relocation of the concept being “pet” translated as “bicho”. This it 

treated in a generic way to refer to the cat, acquiring a neutral prosodic 

load. 

Although I thus readily accounted to my 

reason, if not altogether to my conscience, for the startling 

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fact just detailed, it did not the less fail to make a deep 

impression upon my fancy. For months I could not rid 

myself of the phantasm of the cat; and, during this period, 

there came back into my spirit a half-sentiment that 

seemed, but was not, remorse. I went so far as to regret 

the loss of the animal, and to look about me, among the vile 

haunts which I now habitually frequented, for another pet of 

the same species, and of somewhat similar appearance, 

with which to supply its place. 

Embora assim prontamente procurasse 

satisfazer a minha razão, senão de todo a minha 

consciência, a respeito do surpreendente fato que acabo 

de narrar, nem por isso deixou ele de causar profunda 

impressão na minha imaginação. Durante meses, eu não 

me pude libertar do fantasma do gato e, nesse período, 

voltava-me ao espírito um vago sentimento que parecia 

remorso, mas não era. Cheguei a ponto de lamentar a 

perda do animal e de procurar, entre as tascas ordinárias 

que eu agora habitualmente freqüentava, outro bicho da 

mesma espécie e de aparência um tanto semelhante com 

que substituí-lo. 

Also, although unload the concept “animal” is viewed with a 

negative prosodic load, as is it visualized in Figures 1 and 2 ahead, the 

TT downloads the markedness of “beast” by translating it as “animal” 

which is not negatively connoted as “beast”. 

And now was I indeed wretched beyond 

the wretchedness of mere Humanity. And a brute beast - 

whose fellow I had contemptuously destroyed - a brute 

beast to work out for me - for me a man, fashioned in the 

image of the High God - so much of insufferable wo! Alas! 

neither by day nor by night knew I the blessing of Rest any 

more! During the former the creature left me no moment 

alone; and, in the latter, I started, hourly, from dreams of 

unutterable fear, to find the hot breath of the thing upon my 

face, and its vast weight an incarnate Night-Mare that I had 

no power to shake off - incumbent eternally upon my heart! 

E então eu era em verdade um desgraçado, 

mais desgraçado que a própria desgraça humana. E um 

bronco animal, cujo companheiro eu tinha com desprezo 

destruído, um bronco animal preparava para mim - para 

mim, homem formado à imagem do Deus Altíssimo - tanta 

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4.3 Discussion of the results 

angústia intolerável! Ai de mim! Nem de dia nem de noite 

era-me dado mais gozar a bênção do repouso! Durante o 

dia, o bicho não me deixava um só momento e, de noite, 

eu despertava, a cada instante, de sonhos de indizível 

pavor, para sentir o quente hálito daquela coisa no meu 

rosto e o seu enorme peso, encarnação de pesadelo, que 

eu não tinha forças para repelir, oprimindo eternamente o 

meu coração! 

This subsection explores the findings obtained from the wordlist. 

The comments are itemized for readability purposes. 

(i) The first aspect to stand out in Table 2 above is the fact that 

although fully representative of the occurrences related to 

this node, the list generated on the node “it” can lead to 

wrong assumptions on the analysis proposed. This figure 

alone does not tell much as “it” can be a pronoun referring 

to a number of elements in the short story, not only the 

“cat”. A qualitative analysis of this pronoun indicates forty 

occurrences of it as referring to “the cat” in contrast to the 

Portuguese pronoun “ele”, in this specific conto, with 16 

(sixteen) occurrences referring to “o gato” specifically. 

(ii) A discrete increase of the usage of “gato” (+1) as opposed 

to “cat”, and the omission of the word “besta” as opposed to 

eight occurrences of “beast” in the ST. In the TT all the 

instances of “beast” were rendered into Portuguese as 

“animal”. Even though the translator keeps the same 

negative load as in “beast”, which is itself “negatively 

connoted”, the semantic prosody of “animal” is also kept 

negative in TT by means of surrounding it by negative 

collocates in the parts that were and were not related to 

“beast”. 

One night, returning home, much intoxicated, 

from one of my haunts about town, I fancied that the cat 

avoided my presence. I seized him; when, in his fright at 

my violence, he inflicted a slight wound upon my hand with 

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his teeth. The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I 

knew myself no longer. My original soul seemed, at once, 

to take its flight from my body and a more than fiendish 

malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre of my frame. I 

took from my waistcoat-pocket a pen-knife, opened it, 

grasped the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut 

one of its eyes from the socket! I blush, I burn, I shudder, 

while I pen the damnable atrocity. 

Certa noite, de volta a casa, bastante 

embriagado, de uma das tascas dos subúrbios, supus que 

o gato evitava minha presença. Agarrei-o, mas, nisto, 

amedrontado com a minha violência ele me deu uma leve 

dentada na mão. Uma fúria diabólica apossou-se 

instantaneamente de mim. Cheguei a desconhecer-me. 

Parecia que alma original me havia abandonado de 

repente o corpo e uma maldade mais do que satânica, 

saturada de álcool, fazia vibrar todas as fibras de meu 

corpo. Tirei do bolso do colete um canivete, abri, agarrei o 

pobre animal pela garganta e, deliberadamente, arranqueilhe 

um dos olhos da órbita! Coro, abraso-me, estremeço ao 

narrar a condenável atrocidade. 

(iii) An overwhelming increase of usage of the word “animal” 

(+12) as opposed to “animal” in the ST, also, “creature” with 

five occurrences, as opposed to three in the TT. The word 

“playmate”, translated as “companheiro” and as showed in 

the alignment (Appendix 20), presents and increases the 

usage in (+1) as opposed to “playmate” with one 

occurrence. The node “pet” as in “animal de estimação” or 

similar concepts is not presented in the TT, but in a two 

instances it is presented as “bicho(s)”. 

Pluto - this was the cat's name - was my 

favorite pet and playmate. I alone fed him, and he attended 

me wherever I went about the house. It was even with 

difficulty that I could prevent him from following me through 

the streets. 

Plutão - assim se chamava o gato - era o 

meu preferido e companheiro. Só eu lhe dava de comer e 

ele me acompanhava por toda a parte da casa, por onde 

eu andasse. Era mesmo com dificuldade que eu conseguia 

impedi-lo de acompanhar-me pelas ruas. 

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(iv) As to “Pluto/Plutão” and “Monster/Monstro” the number of 

occurrences remains the same, translating them in 

consonance with the same concepts in the source text. 

Of my own thoughts it is folly to speak. 

Swooning, I staggered to the opposite wall. For one instant 

the party upon the stairs remained motionless, through 

extremity of terror and of awe. In the next, a dozen stout 

arms were toiling at the wall. It fell bodily. The corpse, 

already greatly decayed and clotted with gore, stood erect 

before the eyes of the spectators. Upon its head, with red 

extended mouth and solitary eye of fire, sat the hideous 

beast whose craft had seduced me into murder, and whose 

informing voice had consigned me to the hangman. I had 

walled the monster up within the tomb! 

Loucura seria falar de meus próprios 

pensamentos. Desfalecendo, recuei até a parede oposta. 

Durante um minuto, o grupo que se achava na escada 

ficou imóvel, no paroxismo do medo e do pavor. Logo 

depois, uma dúzia de braços robustos se atarefava em 

desmantelar a parede. Ela caiu inteiriça. O cadáver, já 

grandemente decomposto, e manchado de coágulos de 

sangue, erguia-se, ereto, aos olhos dos espectadores. 

Sobre sua cabeça, com a boca vermelha escancarada, o 

olho solitário chispante, estava assentado o horrendo 

animal cuja astúcia me induzira ao crime e cuja voz 

delatora me havia apontado ao carrasco. Eu havia 

emparedado o monstro no túmulo! 

From these observations it is possible to say that the TT 

downloads the markedness of the ST as regards the construction of the 

character “the cat”. In fact, it neutralizes the connotations pervading the 

concept “cat”, which is translated as “gato”, “animal”, and not as marked 

forms as happens in the ST, with expressions such as in “creature”, 

“beast”,“Pluto” and “playmate”. However, these latter instances are 

predominantly related to a semantic prosodic load, that is to say, when 

the character is explicitly intended to be displayed in a good or bad way. 

As in the beginning when it is addressed by its name “Pluto/Plutão” or 

“playmate/companheiro”, and in the end when it is no longer viewed as 

the same lovely animal it was viewed in the beginning. From an 

observation of the plot analysis referring to the main nodes, it becomes 

evident that the words “cat” and “Pluto” in the ST tend to concentrate at 

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the beginning of the story. Being the “cat” located between 0 and 70% of 

story but having its maximum concentration in the stretch of 35 to 55% of 

the story length, and the node “Pluto”, from the 12 to 54% of the story 

length . 

Figure 2: Node “Pluto” 

Figure 3: Node “Cat” 

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On the other hand, from an observation of the plot analysis 

referring to “cat”, “beast”, “creature” and “monster” in both languages, it 

becomes evident that the concepts “cat” and “gato” interestingly 

disappear around 70% of the text, being replaced by other substitutes 

such as “animal”, “beast”, “monster” and “it”, as the most common ones. 

On the whole, the 11 occurrences of concepts are located in the same 

length of both texts. This way, as the figure of the “cat” starts to be 

demonized by its owner, at the same time, it starts being referred to by 

means of concepts loaded with a more negative or neutral semantic 

prosody. Based on these comments the following results and 

conclusions can be drawn to illustrate this hypothesis as showed in the 

next paragraphs. Due to being treated as a generic concept representing 

a specific character, or as already mentioned common denominations of 

the concepts, the words “cat” and “gato” are present in most part of the 

story, showing a neutral semantic prosody. As the story moves towards 

the end, “cat” and “gato” start being conveyed by “animal”, “beast”, 

“monster”, “creature” and “it” in the ST, “animal”, “monstro” and “criatura” 

in the TT. That is to say, concepts loaded with a negative semantic 

prosody. More affectionate forms such as “playmate/companheiro” or the 

simple address by its name as it is in “Pluto/Plutão” disappear in the 

beginning of the story, more precisely. These characteristics if not 

determinant at least provide evidence for a tendency towards 

demonizing of the character the “cat/gato”, viewing it with a satanic 

image, and also for the process of degradation of its owner, 

distinguishing what it is a linear process based on lexical choices, that is 

to say, as the tales unfolds and the level affection on the cat grows 

dimmer, and the degradation of its owner becomes apparent, as a result 

of that, the lexical choices concerning the main character are changed.. 

Also, “animal/animal” is presented in both instances as having mostly a 

negative semantic prosody, that is to say, in moments were the cat’s 

owner associates his disgrace to the existence of the animal. 

Besides presenting more occurrences of the concept “animal” if 

compared to the ST, the concept “animal” in the TT also carries a 

negative semantic prosody load, being associated meanly to collocate 

such as “pavor”, “ódio”, “horror”, “pobre”, “horrendo, “bronco”, “matava”, 

“perda”, etc. Although in English a lower number of occurrences is made 

evident, the same concept , “animal”, is also associated, in most of the 

cases, to negatively loaded forms, for example, “blow at the animal”, 

“horror”, “crafty”, “loss of the animal”, “rope about the animal’s neck”, etc. 

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Figure 4: Node “Animal” (TT) 

Even though the number of occurrences is increased in the TT, 

the translation keeps the predominance of the same negative semantic 

prosody for animal. 

Figure 5: Node “Animal” (ST) 

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Although the concept animal is also referred to with a positive and 

neutral prosodic load, yet it maintains a predominant negative prosody in 

the TT. As mentioned in the introduction, this article is inspired by 

previous work by José Manual Dávilla-Montes, in which he proposes to 

evidence “the empirical usefulness of corpora methodology applied 

within contrastive studies and translation”, by means of viewing the 

collocational profile of the analyzed nodes and their semantic prosody. 

Just as with Dávilla-Montes’ work, it becomes clear that collocates 

behave as word-choice modulators for translators, and these word 

choices somehow parallel the semantic prosody of a node as the story 

comes to its end. 

5 Conclusion 

This piece of research was carried out in the area of Translation 

Studies (TS) known as Corpus-based Translation Studies (CTS). Within 

this framework, it drew specifically on the notion of semantic prosody, to 

describe the construction of a character in a short story by Poe (1843), 

“The black cat”, translated into Brazilian Portuguese as “O gato preto” 

(1965), by Oscar Mendes, which composed the Small-Scale Bilingual 

Parallel Corpus of the investigation. The study aimed at describing “the 

consistent aura of meaning with which a form is imbued by its collocates” 

(Louw, 1993, p. 157), that indicates an evaluative or pragmatic sense 

that a lexical item assumes in consequence of the presence and cooccurrence 

of other lexical items. The selection of this specific notion 

was related to the fact that by means of the observation of prosodic and 

collocational patterns it was possible to describe the construction of a 

character throughout a short story in terms of the evaluative 

representation as manifested in the narrative. In this specific case, the 

“character” whose construction was observed and described was the 

“cat/gato” itself, the protagonist of the short stories established in the 

analyses of the tales. One of the main features of this character was the 

fact that its representation changed as the tale unfolds (Dávila-Montes, 

http://www.jdvila.com;w0a4) in consonance with changes occurring in its 

owner. That said, the hypothesis informing this research was that it was 

possible to trace the “cat/gato” transformation by looking at the semantic 

prosodies related to this lexical item and the concepts referring to it, here 

referred to as “node”, to use the term of corpus methodologies (Louw, 

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1993). From this initial hypothesis, the study sought to answer following 

Research Questions (RQs): 

(i) Is the SP in both texts an indication of the way “the cat” is 

perceived and represented/constructed? 

(ii) What collocational profile emerges from the prosodic analysis 

of the node? 

(iii) Do the stylistic choices as manifested in the semantic 

prosodic patterns in the ST reflect the same semantic load in 

the story rendered into the TT? 

According to Berber Sardinha (2002) “the sense of a certain 

lexical item extends to a broader part of the text, tainting the context 

around it” in the sense the word choice of a specific node reflects the 

contextual content and establishes a certain degree of modulation based 

on its collocates. 

As for RQ (i), the results obtained in this investigation provide 

evidences for the fact that the word choice, referring to the semnatic 

prosody of the nodes, is determinant to set the nature and content of 

what a horror story is and for the way the character – “the cat / o gato” – 

was represented as the tales unfold. 

As for RQ (ii) it was possible to conclude that the TT concentrated 

more on the common denomination for the concept “cat” as in “gato”, 

“animal” thus downloading the markedness present in the ST in items 

such as creature, beast, concepts loaded with a negative semantic 

prosody. As the story moved towards the end, “cat” and “gato” start 

being conveyed by “beast”, “monster”, “creature” and “it” in the ST, 

whereas in Portuguese “beast” was translated out of the text and 

“creature” occurred as “criatura” in lower number of occurrences (see 

Table 2). 

As for RQ (iii), in terms of translation, the TT follows a similar 

semantic prosody pattern, locating concepts within the same semantic 

denominations they are placed in the ST. Except for the instances such 

as “Beast” translated out, “creature” translated as “bicho” and visualized 

by means of alignment analysis and concordance, the TT was able to 

keep similar prosodic pattern referring to the same concepts present in 

the ST: the same prosodic load as emerged in the analysis of the 

collocational profile of the nodes “cat/gato”. In this sense, the results 

obtained allow us to say that the construction of the process of 

demonization in the Brazilian Portuguese version was not as effective as 

it was in the English version, as regards the parallelism between word 

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choice and collocational patterning, but still, most part of the concepts 

followed the same semantic prosody as in the ST. 

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