Polarized Discourses of Abortion in English: A Corpus-based Study of Semantic Prosody and Discursive Salience

Abstract

Amidst ongoing global debate about reproductive rights, questions have emerged about the role of language in reinforcing stigma around termination. Amongst some ‘pro-choice’ groups, the use of pro-life is discouraged, and anti-abortion is recommended. In UK official documents, termination of pregnancy is generally used, and abortion is avoided. Lack of empirical research focused on lexis means it is difficult to draw conclusions about the role language plays in this polarized debate, however. This paper, therefore, explores whether the stigma associated with abortion may reflect negative semantic prosody. Synthesizing quantitative corpus linguistic methods and qualitative discourse analysis, it presents findings that indicate that abortion has unfavourable semantic prosody in a corpus of contemporary internet English. These findings are considered in relation to discursive salience, offering a theoretical framework and operationalization of this theory. Through this lens, the paper considers whether the discursive salience of extreme anti-abortion discourses may strengthen the negative semantic prosody of abortion. It, therefore, combines a contribution to theory around semantic prosody with a caution to those using abortion whilst unaware of its possibly unfavourable semantic prosody.