Good cop, bad cop? : A corpus analysis on the semantic prosody of the noun cop

Sammanfattning: The public opinion on the favourability towards the police varies greatly in the different populations in the United States. This is a corpus linguistic study that investigates a possible change in semantic prosody of the word cop. The study also investigates the distribution of the keyword in the different subcorpora to see if it has driven an overall change in the semantic prosody. The source is the Corpus of Historical American English, dating from 1800 to 2009. The Corpus of Historical American English is divided into four subcategories that have a median of 51% fictional material throughout the corpus. The four subcategories in the corpus are fiction, news, popular magazines, and non-fictional books. The data are divided into two categories, the first one being the positive/neutral category and the second category being the negative category. Neutral/positive is when cop is used with neutral or positive connotations and the negative is when cop is used with negative connotations. The period studied is that of 1859 to 2009 and this time span is divided into four periods to be more manageable. The distribution of the word in the subcorpora shows that the cop is used mostly in fictional material. The results show that the use of cop in contextual positive or neutral situations increase during the time span. To further this matter additional studies on cop in other corpora from America and other parts of the speaking world would benefit the knowledge on the noun’s semantic prosody and to further knowledge in the public opinion on the police.