Semantic prosody, also discourse prosody, describes the way in which certain seemingly neutral words can be perceived with positive or negative associations through frequent occurrences with particular collocations.
Coined in analogy to linguistic prosody, popularised by Bill Louw.
[1] Another well-known example is the verb sense of cause, which is also used mostly in a negative context (accident, catastrophe, etc.
Using such a method, Elena Tognini-Bonelli (2001) found that the word largely occurred more frequently with negative words or expressions, while broadly appeared more frequently with positive ones.
Lexicographers have often failed to account for semantic prosody when defining a word, although with the recent development and increasing use of computers, the field of corpus linguistics is now being combined with that of lexicography.