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Abstract In corpus linguistics, semantic prosody is defined as a linguistic phenomenon in which one word attracts others with the same semantic features to form some habitual collocations imbued with a certain semantic aura. The general approach to semantic prosody is corpus-based and corpus-driven with word frequency, T-score and M-score as the means to attain a quantitative description between words and spans. Since semantic prosody is the co-occurrence of words with similar semantic preferences, it is suitable to be dealt with from the perspective of words' co-occurrence network. Linguistic data used to weave a network were retrieved and collected from the British National Corpus, with ″influence″ and several other words as keywords. The network-based research shows that semantic prosody is an stable, objective and regular bi-stratified structure and has two correspondent modes of semantic diffusions. As for bi-stratified structure, both network graphic typology and its attached analytical parameters show that a radiating hub is produced between a keyword node and its neighbours. Observed from the network and supported by the parameter of the low clustering co-efficient of the keyword node, the structure of the hub with its neighbours is a concentrative, radiating, related (between the hub and its neighbours) core, in which, however, neighbours are much less connected to each other. In addition, the core can also be analysed semantically by observing the semantic meanings of both the hub and its neighbours. By observing the hub ″influence″ and its neighbors in semantic meanings, it is derived that, out of that structure, a relatively clear and concrete semantic unit comes into being in the section covering the core. The central semantic meaning diffuses out of the radiating connections between the hub's semantic meaning and those of its neighbours because the meanings of all nodes are closely related and intensified by the co-occurrence of the semantic meanings with similar preferences. It is observed that the holistic meaning coming out of the core diffusion is the cornerstone of the whole semantic prosody, which is proved stable and objective by trying other keywords. Meanwhile, the network and its attached analytical parameters also illustrate the second stratification of semantic prosody, that is, the structure in which the peripheral nodes outside the neighbours of the hub form cliques. A clique works as a holistic unit to a certain extent and is weakly related to the hub through its neighbours. A specific investigation into the semantic meanings of the peripheral nodes indicates two points: the peripheral nodes create cliques only to produce a holistic meaning unit to a certain extent before they are related indirectly and loosely to the hub through its neighbours; the peripheral nodes are rarely related in semantics, and accordingly the meanings of cliques are vague. Compared with the core with a clear and concentrative meaning in semantic prosody, the peripheral nodes and cliques diffuse a hidden and unclear meaning expressing uncertain illocutionary purposes to expand the core's meaning in more than one way and make it full and complete. Therefore, the core and peripheral cliques have different structures that diffuse distinctive meanings respectively. All the above structures and meanings diffusions have been supported by the study of other keywords' semantic prosodies based on co-occurrence network. It is concluded that semantic prosody has both an stable, objective and regular bi-stratified structure and two correspondent modes of semantic diffusions. The basic meaning of semantic prosody is created in the core, while the cliques convey the vague and unclear illocutionary meanings like attitudinal meaning, pragmatic functions, communication purposes, evaluations etc. Furthermore, the stable and regular bi-stratified structure of semantic prosody can be interpreted, at a deep level, as a pragmatic cognitive inertia in which semantic prosody diffuses its meaning through steady and regular patterns. Based on a co-occurrence network approach to semantic prosody, the derived structure and semantic patterns not only expand and deepen the traditional approach to semantic prosody, but also reveal more to the formation, semantic diffusions and pragmatic cognition process of semantic prosody. Working as a new approach to semantic prosody, language network can give a holistic and systemic description of and penetration into semantic prosody, which helps to expand, improve and refine the study on semantic prosody.
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