Ever since their recent arrival on the scene of lexical grammar, the concepts of semantic prosody and semantic preference have been fraught with complications. In this paper I examine the two related concepts, in the light of recent work by Hoey (2005). Each section begins with a definition, attempt a review of relevant current positions and then describe a number of corpus-based experiments I conducted to throw light on the two phenomena. Finally, I will try to draw some conclusions about the relationship between them.