[Corpora-List] Corpus linguistics in everyday life

[Martin Wynne]

In the light of the helpful comments from others, I can agree that there is
a stronger negative semantic prosody associated with the longer patterns "at
a personal price" and "pay a personal price". In the examples from the Bank
of English and the BNC (see my original posting on this topic) "personal
price" is always strongly negative, and is often part of the longer patterns
mentioned above. (I'm ruling out the neutral "personal price discrimination"
because I think it is a different pattern - "personal" is qualifying "price
discrimination").

Various people have attested to not having an intuition about negative
connotation associated with "A personal loan with a personal price", and
some people have pointed out other competing effects to do with the context
and cotext in this particular case. In particular, there are ways in which
"personal" has a disposition to be positive. I think everyone would agree
that you can't predict which semantic prosody effects (or "priming" effects
as Michael Hoey might say) will come into effect in a particular individual
in a specific case, and that there are likely to be competing effects in any
given case.

Having said that, I've had a bit of a trawl on the web, and there are some
occurrences of "personal price" which are fairly neutral, but they are all
technical financial terminology. I also tried searching in Google for
"personal price" qualified by positive adjectives like "welcome",
"excellent" and "interesting" and found no occurrences, while negative ones
do occur. Furthermore, adjectives like "high" and "ultimate" seem to have
the effect of intensifying the negativity of the experience. Can anyone
actually find a positive example?

Martin

__
Martin Wynne
Head of the Oxford Text Archive

Oxford University Computing Services
13 Banbury Road
Oxford
UK - OX2 6NN
Tel: +44 1865 283299
Fax: +44 1865 273275
martin.wynne at ota.ahds.ac.uk



-----Original Message-----
From: Georg Marko [mailto:georg.marko at uni-graz.at]
Sent: 20 October 2003 15:01
To: CORPORA at HD.UIB.NO
Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] Corpus linguistics in everyday life


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)
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