I'm now mulling over different prosodies in different situations, different
Englishes, etc. I'm not so sure AmerEngl always has such negative
connotations unless the personal price is scaled (a 'high personal price')
or colloc w/ pro [a person] + pay
-----Original Message-----
From: Lee, David
To: Martin Wynne; CORPORA (E-mail)
Sent: 10/17/03 1:25 PM
Subject: RE: [Corpora-List] Corpus linguistics in everyday life
Re: ""The personal loan with the personal price"
Maybe I'm the only one who doesn't see any problem with this as an
advertisement. It seems clear that the copywriters were well aware of
the negative connotations of "personal price" and were deliberately
playing on it, the way almost all ads play on words, seeking to
titillate, shock, amuse, etc. in order to get us jaded modern-day
consumers to pay attention to the ad. The bank wants to emphasise the
individual nature of their loan interest (a personally priced rate, not
a blanket/group rate) and are hoping that the "double-take" readers have
will make this message sink in. Typical advertising language, and, I
think, brilliant ad copywriters... my hat off to them. (Also, note that
usages of "personal price" are normally almost always preceded by "pay"
(not present in this ad), which contributes a lot to the negative
meaning.)
D.
___________________________________________________
David YW Lee
dvdlee@umich.edu
Research Fellow, MICASE project
English Language Institute, University of Michigan
TCF Building, 401 E. Liberty, Suite 350, Rm 3140
Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104-2298, USA. Tel: +1 734-615-9638 (O)
MICASE web site: http://www.lsa.umich.edu/eli/micase/micase.htm
Corpus-based Linguistics web site: http://devoted.to/corpora
___________________________________________________
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