3L: Language, Linguistics, Literature ® The Southeast Asian Journal of English Language Studies Vol 29(1), March 2023 http://doi.org/10.17576/3L-2023-2901-13 184 Semantic Preference and Semantic Prosody of the Collocations of Sustainable in NOW Corpus DENITHA PUTRI HARDIMAN Universitas Gadjah Mada, Indonesia TRI NURANIWATI Universitas Gadjah Mada, Indonesia trinuraniwati@ugm.ac.id ABSTRACT Sustainability has dominated the conversation about climate change since the early 2000s. The presence of Sustainable Development Goals strengthened the connection between the two (SDGs) set up by the United Nations General Assembly in 2015, with Goal Number 13 being climate action concerning the ever-worsening climate change. Ever since the word ‘sustainable’ has been heavily circulated in the media, it has been associated with various words from fashion to finance. Utilising the News on the Web (NOW) Corpus, the study explores the representation of the word ‘sustainable’ in media concerning climate change discussion under semantic prosody and semantic preference analysis. Using collocations of the node word, semantic preference determines the semantic set related to the node word, while semantic prosody interprets the environment in which the node word pertains. The collocations are semantically labelled with the help of an automatic semantic tagger UCREL Semantic Analysis System (USAS) to find the semantic preference. At the same time, the concordance lines in NOW Corpus are examined to determine the semantic prosody. The study finds that the word ‘sustainable’ tends to be associated with semantic sets related to the environment, Sustainable Development Goals, social issues and humanity, as well as money. It also indicates that the node word has positive prosody. The representation of the word ‘sustainable’ in the media is seen as favourable, not only as a way of living but also as a way of behaving in many aspects encompassing our lives. Keywords: collocation; semantic preference; semantic prosody; sustainable; NOW Corpus INTRODUCTION The concept of sustainability has been surrounding climate change discussion since the early 2000s (Raskin et al., 2002). Climate change is one of our planet's most significant threats and goes far beyond environmental matters. In 2015, the United Nations and 193 countries finally adopted 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to achieve sustainable development globally by 2030 (United Nations, n.d.). The connection between sustainability and climate change was strengthened with Goal Number 13, “climate action”, proposed to tackle the ever-worsening climate change. SDGs campaigns around the globe put the word sustainable into the spotlight. Both sustainable and sustainability have been widely discussed across various platforms, including online news media, for the past few years. As convenient news sources, online news media can change public perceptions of specific issues (Wei et al., 2021; Enh & Samak, 2020). With such influence, the media might serve as a narrative changer in discussing climate change and sustainability. Carvalho (2010) emphasised that media can act as essential agents in producing, reproducing, and transforming the meanings of specific social issues. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate change, media representation