Dear Gordon,
in purely quantitative terms, your guess turns out to be correct: The
British National Corpus records 2 occurrences of 'personal price' vs 13 for
'personal cost' (4 vs 5 for the Bank of English sample).
Best,
Veronika
At 10:36 18.10.2003 +1000, Gordon and Pam Cain wrote:
>Mmmmm. Interesting.
>
>I pointed this unfortunate turn of phrase out to my wife, who is not a
>linguist,
>and she said it would never make her think twice -- the meaning is obvious,
>though her response is cynical with the ad coming from a bank.
>
>She did comment that what would stop her would be 'at a personal cost'. I
>don't
>have a corpus handy to test this on, but my guess is that 'personal cost'
>is the
>more common expression, and 'personal price' has perhaps by substitution
>entered
>our language. Any takers with a suitable handy corpus?
>
>Prosodies, understood and intended meanings, corpus data. . . All very
>interesting.
>
>Gordon Cain
>Director of Studies
>Tyndale Intensive Language Centre
>Blacktown (Sydney) Australia
>
>
>17/10/03 21:44:46, Martin Wynne <martin.wynne@ota.ahds.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> >Barclays Bank need a corpus linguist. Has anyone else noticed and been
> >surprised by the current advertising slogan for Barclayloan in the UK: "The
> >personal loan with the personal price"?
> >(e.g. at
> >http://www.personal.barclays.co.uk/BRC1/jsp/brccontrol?site=pfs&task=article
> >group&value=2522&target=_self)
> >
Dr. Veronika Koller
Assistant Professor
Department of English Business Communication
Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration
Augasse 9
A-1090 Vienna/Austria
tel. ++43-1-31336 4068
fax ++43-1-31336 747
http://www.wu-wien.ac.at/inst/english/koller.html
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