Signe Oksefjell Ebeling 30 October 2014

The secret life of words:

Implications for English language

teaching and learning?

What does hot mean?

She pours the hot water into the sink.

She pours the hot water into the sink.

The case became a hot potato for the government.

Ann bought the hot dog.

Phoebe offered Maggie a cup of hot chocolate.

I'd wear the hot pants -- without the flowers.

Hot off the press.

With the addition of plenty of hot English mustard.

It is a hot topic.

The gardener burst in with Mrs C. hot on his heels.

Nearly seventy acres of magnificent gardens and hot houses.

It was as if she had a hot line to the Devil.

He was a real hot shot.

I followed in hot pursuit.

The same word?

Is this English?

Dear Jonathan,

I hanker for this letter to be good. Like you know, I am not

first rate with English. In Russian my ideas are asserted

abnormally well, but my second tongue is not so premium. I

undertaked to input the things you counseled me to, and I

fatigued the thesaurus you presented me, as you counseled

me to, when my words appeared too petite, or not befitting.

If you are not happy with what I have performed, I command

you to return it back to me. I will persevere to toil on it until

you are appeased. (Alex Perchov in Everything is illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer)

Dear Jonathan,

I hanker for this letter to be good. Like you know, I am not first

rate with English. In Russian my ideas are asserted abnormally

well, but my second tongue is not so premium. I undertaked to

input the things you counseled me to, and I fatigued the

thesaurus you presented me, as you counseled me to, when my

words appeared too petite, or not befitting. If you are not happy

with what I have performed, I command you to return it back to

me. I will persevere to toil on it until you are appeased.

want – as – very good at – expressed uncommonly – language –

perfect – implement (?) – advised – exhausted – gave – advised –

my vocabulary appeared too small or not appropriate – how I have

performed / what I have done – ask – continue to work – content

Outline

• Vocabulary and phraseology

– The chameleonic nature of words

– The puzzle of native-like selection

• Awareness and insight through exposure to

authentic English

– Corpora

– Corpus exercises

• Implications for English language teaching

and learning?

Vocabulary

• The stock of words in a language

– For language users it is important to know the

meaning of words

– However, this may not be enough:

You shall know a word by the company it keeps! (Firth, 1957:11)

The chameleonic nature of words

• Words that are synonymous in isolation are

not interchangeable in context.

• Synonyms: – Fierce, violent, ferocious

• Fierce + competition, fighting, opposition, eyes, attack

• Violent + crime, clashes, incidents, disorder, behaviour

• Ferocious + attack, attacks, war

Knowing a word thus includes knowing the expressions it

commonly occurs in as well as the meanings that a word

acquires by being associated with others. (Hasselgård, 2012)

Phraseology

• The stock of word combinations in a

language

• Linguistic knowledge encompasses:

– ‘memorized sentences’ (e.g. A friend in need is a friend

indeed)

– ‘lexicalized sentence stems’ (e.g. come to think of …, I

completely forget …)

– ‘phraseological expressions […] less than a

completely specified clause’ (e.g. sausage dog, keep an

eye on)

(Pawley and Syder 1983: 205)

Native-like selection

1. I think this is a very solid statement.

2. … the cosy time in front of the television set.

3. You certainly don't burn a big amount of calories by

doing that. From the Norwegian component of

the International Corpus of Learner English

[P]hraseology is one of the aspects that unmistakably

distinguishes native speakers of a language from L2

learners. (Granger & Bestgen 2014: 229)

How to raise awareness and gain

insight?

• Through exposure to authentic English

– Corpora

– Corpus exercises

Corpus: a body of texts

• representing authentic language use

• put together in a principled way

• computer-readable

• for use in linguistic research

Non-native selection

1. I think this is a very solid statement .

2. … the cosy time in front of the

television set.

3. You certainly don't burn a big amount

of calories by doing that.

The ADJ + NOUN collocations

are variable; the noun selects a

variety of adjectives, but not all!

Adj + statement

clear, full, explicit,

definitive, important,

original, factual, true,

strong cosy + noun

atmosphere, bar, chat,

corner, cottage,

relationship, room a/an ADJ amount

certain, considerable, small,

large, fair, enormous,

substantial, vast,

tremendous, significant,

limited, huge

Available corpora

• British National Corpus (BNC)

http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/ – a 100-million-word collection of samples of written and spoken language

from a wide range of sources, designed to represent a wide cross-section of

British English from the later part of the 20th century.

• Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA)

http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/ – the largest freely-available corpus of English and contains more than 450

million words of text, equally divided among spoken, fiction, popular

magazines, newspapers, and academic texts. It includes 20 million words

each year from 1990-2012 and the corpus is also updated regularly.

An example (from Crystal 2009)

I [David Crystal] had a monthly assignment to respond to English

language reader queries for a German teacher magazine, Praxis,

and that brought up [...] questions to do with vocabulary and idiom.

'Would you have marked it wrong?', the column was called. Here's

an example.

The candidate wrote, 'The hotel was fully unknown to me'; the

examiner corrected 'fully' to 'entirely'.

Would I have marked it wrong? Well … would you?

A gut reaction isn't enough. You have to be able to say why. Fully

does sound odd, in this context – but why?

Crystal continues…

You begin by exploring the meaning of the word: it

means 'to the full, completely' – that is, without

deficiency. So it tends to be used with words

expressing something positive … (Crystal 2009: 167)

Moving away from the gut reaction …

The question is…

How can this be implemented in a teaching

situation?

Using COCA

Task (1): Search for change and switch; which of the two

most commonly occurs in the corpus (give an example of

each when they function as verbs)?

Task (2): Which of the two can be found to collocate with

places?

Task (3): According to the corpus results you can use both

change and switch FROM something, but can you both

change and switch BETWEEN something? (Supply your

answer with examples.)

Using COCA (on paper)

Task (1): Search for remember *ing and remember to in

the corpus and give an example of each.

Task (2): Use the search results of the previous question

and give an example of remember NOT followed by a verb.

Task (3): Use the search results of Task (1). Explain the

difference in meaning between remember followed by a

verb ending in -ing and remember followed by the to-

infinitive.

Suggested answer to task 3

When remember is followed by a verb ending in -ing you have a memory of

having done something, i.e. you remember doing something after you have

done it, e.g. I remember asking if it was okay... could be paraphrased as: 'I

have a memory of asking you something', or 'I asked you something and

now I remember doing so'.

When remember is followed by the to-infinitive you remember to do

something before you do it, e.g. Will you remember to give them that

message? can be paraphrased as: Will you remember that you have to give

them the message so that you can do it?

The main difference between the two can be said to be that remember

followed by a verb ending in -ing looks backward in time, while remember

followed by the to-infinitive looks forward in time.

Using COCA (on paper) #2

Task (1): Search for remind * about and remind * of in the corpus,

and give an example of each.

Task (2): How do the two expressions differ in meaning and use?

While "remind someone about" has the meaning of telling

someone not to forget, "remind someone of" has the meaning of

causing someone to think of (something/someone) because of a

resemblance.

Syntactically, however, the two expressions behave similarly by

allowing a pronoun between the verb and preposition.

Using COCA (on paper) #3

Task (1): Search for the adjectives angry, annoyed, and furious; which

prepositions do they precede in the corpus? (Give examples only of

combinations that occur more than once.)

Task (2): Concentrate on angry + preposition combinations; can you

point to any tendencies in the uses of the different prepositions?

Task (3): Do the same tendencies apply to annoyed + preposition and furious

+ preposition?

Task (4): Do the same prepositions combine with the more "positive" adjectives

delighted and pleased? (Give examples.)

While angry about typically refers to something you are angry about, angry at

typically refers to someone you are angry at. Although there are counterexamples

to such a generalisation, these are tendencies shown in the corpus.

Other types of phraseological exercise #1

Fill in the gaps with the collocation that most typically occurs in the corpus.

Other types of phraseological exercise #2

Other types of phraseological exercise #3

Select nouns from the list below

and place them in the blanks

below the prepositions they

typically precede in the corpus:

access, alliance, ban,

congratulations, disregard,

dominion, encounter, jurisdiction,

precedence, provision, quarrel,

recipe, restriction, threat, witness

Conclusion: Implications for English

language teaching and learning?

• To uncover the secret life of words we need

to become familar with their phraseology

– Focus on context

– Focus on authentic English

– Focus on how awareness and knowledge can be

gained

• Hands-on corpus searches

• Purpose-made exercises on paper

Focus on data-driven learning:

“…the attempt to cut out the middleman as far as possible and

to give the learner direct access to the data” (Johns 1991: 30)

Access to collocational patterns gives the learner

the opportunity to discover:

the range of meanings a word can have (e.g. hot)

the range of contexts a word can occur in (e.g. can

you say solid statement?)

grammatical constructions associated with a word

(e.g. remember to vs. remember -ing)

choice of prepositions after verbs and adjectives (e.g

sceptical against/of, angry at vs. angry about?)

... corpus-learner, and indeed corpus-teacher

interaction are not replacements for learner-

learner and teacher-learner interaction, but

should rather be seen as an added value

offered by corpus-aided discovery learning.

(Bernardini 2004: 32)

References Bernardini, S. 2004. Corpora in the classroom: An overview and some reflections

on future developments. In Sinclair, J. (ed.). How to Use Corpora in Language

Teaching. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 15-36.

Crystal, D. 2009. Just a Phrase I’m Going through: My Life in Language. London:

Routledge.

Granger, S. & Y. Bestgen. 2014. The use of collocations by intermediate vs.

advanced non-native writers: a bigram-based study. International Review of

Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching (IRAL), 52(3), 229-252.

Hasselgård, H. 2012. Vocabulary: Collocations and the corpus. [ˌmægəˈzi:n],

Cappelen Damms tidsskrift for engelsklærere, 02-2012.

Johns, T. 1991. From printout to handout: Grammar and vocabulary teaching in

the context of data-driven learning. In T. Johns & P. King (eds), Classroom

Concordancing. English Language Research Journal 4, 27-46.

Pawley, A. & F.H. Syder. 1983. Two puzzles for linguistic theory: nativelike

selection and nativelike fluency. In S.C. Richards & R.W. Schmidt (eds),

Language and Communication. London/New York: Longman, pp. 191–226.

Safran Foer, Jonathan. 2002. Everything is Illuminated. London: Penguin.