[Corpora-List] Corpus linguistics in everyday life

[Georg Marko]

I found the discussion on the "Personal loan, personal price" example
very stimulating. But I seem to have got confused about the concept of
semantic prosodies.

The example with "cause" is clear to me, because "cause" seems to be a
verb that goes together with objects expressing negative effects. The
connection is so strong that we may even interpret 'neutral' effects as
negative ("cause work") and find objects with clearly positive meaning
(such as "joy" or "happiness") odd. So I have always defined semantic
prosodies as effects by one word on the evaluative meaning of its
collocates.

But my definition seems to be a bit too narrow, since it would not
really apply to "personal price" because "personal" cannot be claimed to
have a negative effect on the nominal heads that it modifies, nor does
"price" have such an effect on its modifiers.


Just a second thought that came to my mind: what is the effect of the
first occurrence of "personal" within the same sentence. Would it be
possible that if you have a positive meaning of "personal" (e.g.
'adapted to your needs') in close vicinity, this carries over to the
second occurrence, thus suspending the negative meaning of the
combination "personal price" (it would definitely not work with
"personal costs", but then "costs" will always be interpreted as
negative, no matter in which combination)?

This keeps me thinking *Mmmh*

Georg

--
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*Mag. Georg Marko, M.A.
*Institut fuer Anglistik (Department of English Studies)
*Karl-Franzens-Universitaet Graz
*Heinrichstrasse 36, A-8010 Graz
*(privat: Friedrichgasse 36, 8010 Graz)
*tel.: +43/316/380-2474
*e-mail: georg.marko at kfunigraz.ac.at
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