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.

中文翻译：

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英语堕胎话语的两极分化：基于语料库的语义韵律和话语显着性研究

在全球关于生殖权利的持续辩论中，出现了关于语言在加剧终止妊娠耻辱方面所扮演的角色的问题。在一些“支持堕胎”的群体中，不鼓励使用“反对堕胎”一词，并建议反对堕胎。英国官方文件中一般采用终止妊娠，避免堕胎。然而，缺乏针对词汇的实证研究意味着很难就语言在这场两极分化的辩论中所扮演的角色得出结论。因此，本文探讨与堕胎相关的耻辱是否反映了负面语义韵律。综合定量语料库语言方法和定性话语分析，研究结果表明堕胎在当代网络英语语料库中具有不利的语义韵律。这些发现被认为与话语显着性相关，提供了该理论的理论框架和可操作性。通过这个视角，本文思考极端反堕胎话语的话语显着性是否会强化堕胎的负面语义韵律。因此，它将对语义韵律理论的贡献与对那些使用堕胎但不知道其可能不利的语义韵律的人的警告结合起来。