Chapter 4 Lexis: From Collocation to Colligation

4.1 Introduction

This thesis is primarily concerned with two main interrelated concepts: business and

lexis. The last chapter surveyed the literature concerning business language research and

also noted the limitation of lexical studies into business. Unlike business language,

however, research into lexis has both a long tradition and a broad and comprehensive

literature. As lexis is central to this research, this chapter will review work that has been

carried out on it in relation to the three main aspects of lexis that form the basis for the

analysis of Business English in this thesis: collocation, semantic prosody and colligation.

A further element important to this work - prefabricated language - will also be

reviewed here, leading to the final section of the chapter where the pedagogical

implications of studies into lexis will be discussed in relation to the lexical approach

(Lewis 1993, 1997). The chapter is formed from three main parts.

· The first part of the chapter briefly covers the history of lexical research and thought,

reviewing the major movements of nineteenth and twentieth century vocabulary

research.

· The second part of the chapter looks in detail at the notion of collocation, from its

first definitions to more recent definitions and usage. It will be seen that whilst there is

some general consensus on what collocation is, the concept has been defined and used

differently by its researchers. Aspects of collocation important for the lexical analysis

of Business English will be discussed and SinclairÕs (1987, 1991) notion of the idiom

principle will be looked at in detail.

· Discussion on collocation leads logically to a closer look at semantic prosody which

was briefly defined in Chapter 2. This shows how words not only typically collocate

with certain other words, but also typically collocate with semantic sets.

· After semantic prosody, colligation will be discussed. Collocation and semantic

prosody are both concerned with the typical lexical patterning of words. Colligation is

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concerned with the typical grammatical patterning of words (or word classes). It will

be seen that collocation, semantic prosody and colligation are not totally separate

concepts, but are, rather, interdependent and together create a network of meaning.

· The section ends with a working definition of collocation, semantic prosody and

colligation for the purpose of this research. It further defines how all these concepts

are used in the analysis of Business English in this thesis.

· The final, third section, reviews work on prefabricated language - notably multi-word

items (MWIs). MWIs - longer chunks or clusters of language - form part of the

analysis of Business English in this research, thus necessitating a review of the key

concepts related to them. Research into MWIs is both expansive and, due to the

inability of researchers to agree on uniform terminology, complex and confusing. A

brief chronological overview of the development of thought on MWIs will be

presented, and the central tenets on which research has rested will be discussed. The

pedagogical implications of MWI research will then be discussed by relating it to the

lexical approach to language teaching as put forward by Lewis (1993, 1997). This

section will end with a definition of how MWIs have been studied in this thesis with

regard to Business English.

4.2 Vocabulary and pedagogy: a brief history

When looking back over the history of vocabulary research it soon becomes obvious that

many of the ÔnewÕ ideas of today were indeed thought of long ago. DefoeÕs stress of

the importance of business language mentioned in Chapter 2 is matched by the insights

of writers from both the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Howatt (1984)

describes how, as early as the mid-1800s, Thomas Prendergast (1806-1886), a British

civil servant who spent time working in India, noted that children learn not just words,

but ÔchunksÕ of language and utilise these fluently in their speech. In another example,

Howatt notes how the linguistic descriptions of Harold Palmer (1887-1949) sound

distinctly Chomskyan fifty years before Chomsky. Palmer presented the idea of known

units - a database of language that learners need to acquire (similar to Chomsky’s notion

of competence), and from which can be generated an infinite set of sentences -

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secondary matter (similar to Chomsky’s notion of performance) (Howatt 1984:237). A

further idea originating in the nineteenth century, through the work of Pitman, was to

shape thinking on the nature and learning of lexis and its pedagogical application, lasting

until the mid-twentieth century. This was the notion of vocabulary control.

The basic idea behind this movement was one of lexical choice - the most important

words of a language should be given to students to learn first and these words should be

limited. Another linguist of note - Henry Sweet (1845-1912) - declared that vocabulary

should be controlled and that ‘3,000 common words would probably suffice for all

except specialist purposes’ (Howatt 1984:187). Interest in vocabulary control grew after

Sweet, continuing through the first half of the twentieth century, notably through the

work of Thorndike in the USA and British linguists Harold Palmer, C.K. Ogden, I.A

Richards, and Michael West. Thorndike (1921) used a corpus of 4.5 million words to

create a word count that was ‘designed to lead to better pedagogical materials for

teaching native speakers of English in the United States to read’ (Kennedy 1992: 336).

This word count ‘helped provide a foundation for the vocabulary control movement’

(Kennedy 1992:336).

Palmer, Ogden and West were all working at around the same time (1920s-1950s) in an

area that was basically the same - vocabulary control - but a severe enmity grew up,

especially between Ogden and West. The reasons were firstly academic, as both were

espousing different systems of the limitation of vocabulary to learners, and secondly

commercial - whoever got the upper hand would, it was assumed, reap the financial

rewards that success and acceptance brought with it.

Ogden, and later Richards, worked on what was termed Basic English (the term ÔBasicÕ

here standing for British American Scientific International Commercial). Basic English

consisted of 850 words that, although not purporting to be full English, attempted to be

not un-English. Carter & McCarthy (1988) note several problems with Basic English:

despite the fact that there were only 850 words, there were potentially over 12,000

meanings attached to them not covered by Ogden - thus polysemy was not taken into

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account. Many normally-used verbs were missing e.g. smoke and walk, and more

damagingly, many everyday phrases such as goodbye and thank you were not included in

the list.

A controlled vocabulary was also advocated by Harold Palmer, mentioned briefly above,

in the 1920s and 1930s. He proposed a list of 3,000 words which would consist of a

ÔdartboardÕ approach with a minimum vocabulary of 1,000 words and an outer ring of

another two thousand. Palmer worked with A.S. Hornby - working together on what later

became Thousand Word English (Palmer & Hornby 1937) - and was, more famously, to

work with Michael West in work that led to the General Service List in 1953.

Michael West60 (1888-1973) worked with Bengali children in India and attempted to

reduce what he saw as the gross wastage of the then prevalent educational system of

ÔfilteringÕ out only the top students (Howatt 1984:245). He concentrated on reading

skills, and found that by substituting the more archaic words in the childrenÕs readers,

and lowering the amount of new words encountered by readers in a text, he was able to

increase their learning dramatically. Both Palmer and West collaborated in the Interim

Report on Vocabulary Selection (1935) or the Carnegie Report as it became known,

following meetings of top linguists, including Thorndike, in New York in 1934 and

London in 1935.61 Subsequently, the first General Service List (GSL) was published in

1936. The report from these two conferences

... clearly outlined the principle that items with a likely high frequencyof occurrence in texts should be learned first to avoid memory overloadand confusion and to lighten the learning burden. (Kennedy 1992:337)

The final General Service List of 1953 stated that the main criterion for selection of

items for learning should be that of the frequency of each word in written English and

also that ‘information should be provided about the relative prominences of the various

60 West has already been mentioned in Chapter 3 in relation to another of the key concepts he created - needs analysis. An evaluation of West’s (often neglected) contribution to ELT can be found in Tickoo (1988). 61 Ogden had been invited but refused to go.

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meanings and uses of a word form’ (Carter & McCarthy 1988:7). Likewise, Jeffery, in

the Foreword to the 1953 version of the GSL, stated that the main aim was to

... find the minimum number of words that could operate together in constructions capable of entering into the greatest variety of contexts.

Jeffery (1953/67:v)

The GSL was created by a mix of intuition, experience and hard data - the fact that

Thorndike took part in the meetings gave access to corpora of empirical value. However,

like Basic English, the GSL was not without problems: there was no collocational

information at all, the concept of coverage was not fully developed, and simply the fact

that because a word is frequent does not necessarily make it useful for learners to know

it.

Despite these criticisms,62 the influence of the GSL has continued up to the present day

and Howatt (1984:258) mentions the Council of EuropeÕs Threshold level of 1975 as

being influenced by it. Carter & McCarthy (1988:9) term the GSL as ‘one of the most

innovative examples of foreign language pedagogy and lexiometric research this

century’. The publication of both graded readers for students and also many dictionaries

has been brought about largely by this pioneering work.

It should also be noted at this point that Michael West was also aware of ÔspecialistÕ

lexis. Together with W.E. Flood, he produced a supplementary section to the GSL

containing Ôscientific and technical vocabularyÕ (West 1953). This had originated in the

1936 version of the GSL and a fuller version is found in the 1952 collaborative work An

Elementary Scientific and Technical Dictionary (Flood & West 1952). Flood was later

to go further into the examination of scientific vocabulary in his 1957 work The Problem

of Vocabulary in the Popularisation of Science. Discussion in Chapter 9 of this thesis

62 For a more detailed critique of the GSL see RichardsÕ (1975) article Word Lists: Problems and Prospects, where he lists several flaws with both the GSL and the vocabulary control movement in general. He concludes the article by offering a solution to some of the problems of word frequency lists, thus avoiding the exclusion of common pragmatic words that was the problem with the GSM and, amongst others, OgdensÕ Basic list.

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refers back to vocabulary control movement when presenting a potential core lexis of

Business English.

4.2.1 The 1950s to the present day

After the flourishing of vocabulary research and application in the first half of the

twentieth century, there followed a period of Ôlimbo’: ‘In summary, it can be said that

the period 1945-1970 was a limbo for vocabulary as an aspect of language teaching in its

own right’ (Carter & McCarthy 1988:41). Carter & McCarthy note that vocabulary was

relegated to a lowly place in the order of things, mainly due to the influence of American

structural linguistics ‘with its emphasis on phonology and syntactic patterning’

(1988:40). The emphasis on transformational grammar brought about by Chomsky did

little to remedy this situation. However, important developments concerning the study of

text-linguistics had taken place in the 1950s and 1960s that were to profoundly affect

later work and the Ôre-birthÕ of vocabulary. These developments join together the two

key themes under discussion in this thesis - corpus linguistics and lexis.

The first factor in the re-emergence of lexis was the influence of British linguist J.R.

Firth. His interest in collocation, which he defined in articles in the 1950s, engendered

two key articles in 1966, one by John Sinclair, the other by M.A.K. Halliday. 63 These

articles showed remarkable foresight in espousing the use of computer corpora and

stressing the importance of collocation in the study of lexis. In this early work by Sinclair

the origins of later lexical work including the COBUILD project can be seen. Vocabulary

also came into focus in the register analysis movement which began in the 1960s, as was

discussed in the previous chapter (Barber 1962, Herbert 1965, Cowan 1974, Martin 1976,

Friel 1978). The third factor accounting for the revived interest in lexis coincided with a

renewed interest in corpora. The ability of the computer to give access to large amounts

of data facilitated corpus-based studies in lexis never before thought possible.

63 Both the work of Firth and these articles will be discussed later in this chapter in more detail.

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The next section will, therefore, go on to look at more recent developments in the study

of lexis that would have been largely impossible without the use of both corpora and

computers: collocation, semantic prosody and colligation.

4.3 Collocation

It would be desirable, when beginning a section on such an important concept to this

thesis, to begin with a clear and unambiguous definition of collocation. Even a brief

glance at the vast literature on the subject, however, reveals that forming a precise

definition is difficult. There are both conflicting definitions and conflicting

terminologies: ‘Regrettably, collocation is a term which is used and understood in many

different ways’ (Bahns 1993:57). Yet, despite these variations, a general and workable

definition of collocation can be reached and in doing this, certain key factors regarding

collocation that are central to later analysis will be considered:

· a preliminary definition of collocation

· the development of the concept of collocation including grammatical and lexical

descriptions of collocation

· key elements of collocation:

- the notion of upward and downward collocation

- the strength of the collocation - from strong to weak or from fixed to

free-form

- the notion of collocational span

- collocation as an embodiment of the idiom principle (Sinclair 1987,

1991)

- collocations, the idiom principle and Business English

4.3.1 A preliminary definition of collocation

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The following quotations offer a varied view on the concept of collocation, variously

defining it as a lexical, grammatical or research phenomenon, but all containing a focus

on the co-occurrence of words:

You shall know a word by the company it keeps. (Firth 1957:179)

We may use the term node to refer to an item whose collocations weare studying, and we may define a span as the number of lexical itemson each side of a node that we consider relevant to that node. Itemsin the environment set by the span we will call collocates.

(Sinclair 1966:415)

... the study of lexical patterns ... (Brown 1974:1)

... a sequence of words that occurs more than once in identical form

.... and which is grammatically well structured. (Kjellmer 1987:133)

... the meaning of a word has a great deal to do with the words withwhich it commonly associates. (Nattinger (1988:68)

... a recurrent co-occurrence of words. (Clear 1993:277)

... the way individual words co-occur with others. (Lewis

1993:93)

Collocates are the words which occur in the neighbourhood of your search word. (Scott 1999 WordSmith Help File)

... the way in which words occur together in predictable ways. (Lewis & Hill 1998:1)

Thus, whilst it can be seen that the definitions of collocation are somewhat varied, there

is still a common core of agreement to be found. An initial working definition for this

thesis thus could be that collocations refer to words that keep company with one another.

This definition of course will be refined as the chapter continues, and a final definition of

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collocation for the purpose of this thesis will be presented at the end of this part of the

chapter.

Collocation is a complex subject and, before more detailed discussion can take place, two

important characteristics of collocation need to be presented. The first characteristic is

that collocation operates on the syntagmatic rather than on the paradigmatic plane. The

second is that collocation is not necessarily reciprocal.

4.3.1.1 Syntagmatic/paradigmatic relations.

Collocation refers to lexical relations on the syntagmatic or horizontal plane, as opposed

to relations on a paradigmatic, or vertical plane. This is shown in Fig. 19 below, taken

from Walker (1996). Walker explains that ‘On the syntagmatic dimension we can see the

relationship between words’. Therefore, looking at Fig. 19 we can see a syntagmatic

relationship between writhed, ground, excruciating and pain. Conversely, ‘The

paradigmatic dimension looks at the way in which one word can be replaced with

another’ (Walker 1996). This is shown in the diagram, where four separate paradigmatic

choices are presented, e.g. auntie could be replaced by uncle, cousin, mother or milkman.

Syntagmatic: Horizontal relationships

It writhed on the ground in excruciating pain.

Syntagmatic sequence

Paradigmatic (Substitution): Vertical dimension

My auntie has bought a red automobile

uncle sold green car cousin purchased black Ford

mother hired bikemilkmanParadigm 1 Paradigm 2 Paradigm 3 Paradigm 4

Fig. 19 Syntagmatic/paradigmatic relationships adapted from Walker (1996). In the example four paradigmatic choices of lexis are exemplified.

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4.3.1.2 Reciprocal/non-reciprocal collocation.

The second central characteristic of collocations is that they are often non-reciprocal -

the strength of collocation between words is not equal on both sides. As an example, the

words blonde and hair can be seen to be in different relationships. Blonde will only

collocate with a very limited number of words - hair (or words that in this instance in

some way relate back to hair, e.g. girl, woman), but hair will collocate with many words,

e.g. brown, long, short and mousy. Thus, the strength of the bond between words is not

equal. Other examples show that the bond between words can be unilateral, for example,

in the phrase vested interest. Vested only ever collocates with interest, but interest

collocates with many other words.64

Now that these points have been raised, it is time to look at collocation in more detail,

and the next section reviews how the notion of collocation has developed since its first

major explication by Firth (1951/7).

4.3.2 Development of the concept of collocation

The term ÔcollocationÕ has been used since the 18th century65 (Carter & McCarthy

1988:32), but as a fully formed concept it is firmly grounded only in the 20th century.

Harold Palmer, mentioned earlier in this chapter, was perhaps the first to pay attention to

collocation and was keen to include in his teaching materials word partnerships such as

tomorrow morning that he thought should be taught as one linguistic item (Howatt

64 This point is discussed in some detail in Kjellmer (1991) where he distinguishes three basic kinds of collocations. Firstly, Ôright and left predictiveÕ collocations such as Anno Domini and aurora borealis where each word equally suggests the other. The second kind he terms Ôright predictiveÕ, for example, wellington boots, morse code i.e. where a word suggests the word appearing on the right of it but not vice versa, e.g. morse suggests code and wellington suggests boots. Finally, there are Ôleft predictiveÕ collocations such as open sesame, arms akimbo, where one word suggests the word preceding it, but again, not vice versa, e.g. sesame suggests open (Kjellmer 1991:112-113). Thus, most collocations can be seen to be unidirectional in one way or the other. 65 There is some disagreement on this as Gitsaki (1996:1) says that Firth was the first to introduce the term. She does say, however, that the concept of collocation, though not named as such, was known to and described by the ancient Greeks 2,300 years ago (1996:13).

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1984:238). Kennedy (1992) reveals how Palmer made a list of over 6,000 collocations,

believing them to advance the then current definitions of vocabulary (Kennedy

1992:336-337). Palmer also understood the importance of longer phrases and

collocations, terming them polylogs.

However, the father of collocation is widely regarded to be J.R. Firth, and Firth is central

to the lexical composition approach - the first of three schools of thought on collocation

discussed by Gitsaki (1996). The two later approaches to collocation she termed the

semantic approach and the structural approach. Each approach will now be discussed in

turn.

1. The lexical composition approach: Methodologically, this approach ‘is based on the

assumption that words receive their meaning from the words they co-occur with’ (Gitsaki

1996:10). It thus sees lexis as independent of grammar and the Neo-Firthians, as they

were called (represented by Halliday and Sinclair), also kept grammar and lexis separate,

though they did not try to devalue grammar in any way. In his often quoted paper Modes

of Meaning in 1951, Firth provided a more detailed explanation:

Meaning by collocation is an abstraction at the syntagmatic level and is not directly concerned with the conceptual or idea approach to the meaning of words. One of the meanings of night is its collocability with dark, and of dark, of course, collocation with night.

(Firth 1951/1957:196)

Thus part of the meaning of a word is the fact that it collocates with another word. The

other words with which it collocates, however, are often strictly limited. Firth gave the

example of the word ass, saying that ‘There are only limited possibilities with preceding

adjectives, amongst which the commonest are you silly, obstinate, stupid’ (Firth

1951/1957:195).66 The revolutionary part of Firth’s thinking was to look at lexical

relationships at a syntagmatic rather than paradigmatic level, whereas previous grammars

had considered only structural relations at the paradigmatic level (Gitsaki 1996:1).

66 Aston & Burnard (1998:13) actually checked this out using the BNC corpus and found that Ôsilly assÕ occurred 8 times but did not occur once preceded by ÔyouÕ. Such has English changed since the 1950s.

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Firth’s ideas were taken up by Halliday and Sinclair (1966)67 in articles that have been

since regarded as landmark. Halliday (1966) reiterated Firth’s idea that part of the

meaning of a word is the fact that it collocates with others: ‘it is part of the meaning of

‘past’ that it contrasts with ‘present’, and it is part of the meaning of strong that it

collocates with tea’ (Halliday 1966:160). He also noted that collocation cuts across

grammatical boundaries, giving the example of he argued strongly / the strength of his

argument, where the collocation between strong and argument survives the grammatical

change in the sentence (Halliday 1966:150-151).

Collocation was also covered in depth by Sinclair in his article in the same volume.

Although over thirty years old at time of writing, this article still seems very modern in

its approach. Sinclair defined such terms as node and span as they are used today and

analysed the collocates of the words money, pay and ticket, producing a very modern-

looking frequency list of collocates. He termed the list a Total Environment Table which

showed all the collocates in the order of their frequency. Sinclair’s and Halliday’s articles

also stressed the need for computer-based corpus linguistics and, in doing so, were way

ahead of their time (their articles will be returned to later in this chapter). The next

approach to collocational analysis tried to go beyond purely observing collocation, to

saying why it occurred as it did.

2. The semantic approach: This is an approach where ‘linguists attempted to investigate

collocations on the basis of a semantic framework, also separate from grammar’ (Gitsaki

1996:13). The crux of this approach was to try and find out not just that certain words

collocate with each other, but why they collocate: why we can say blonde hair but not

blonde car. The inability to say why words collocate had been a failing with the lexical

composition approach and it still represents a challenge today, though research has been

done on this, for example, Gitsaki cites work done by Mel’cuk (1988).

67 For a good overview of these articles see Carter & McCarthy (1988:33-36).

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3. The structural approach: The third approach to collocation says that ‘collocation is

influenced by structure, and collocations occur in patterns. Therefore...the study of

collocations should include grammar’ (Gitsaki 1996:17). Thus, in contrast to the two

previous approaches, grammar is seen as a central factor that cannot be separated from

lexis.68 Lexical and grammatical collocation thus represent two different but related

aspects of the same phenomenon, and Bahns (1993) defines the difference between them

as follows:

Examples of grammatical collocations include: account for, advantage over, adjacent to, by accident, to be afraid that... They consist of a noun,an adjective, or a verb, plus a preposition or grammatical structure suchas an infinitive or clause. Lexical collocations on the other hand, do notcontain prepositions, infinitives or clauses, but consist of variouscombinations of nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs. (Bahns 1993:57)

There is general agreement in the literature on the division of collocates into lexical or

grammatical categories, though less agreement on their relative importance. Lexical

collocation is defined by Lewis & Hill (1998) as having five main categories:

adjective/noun, verb/noun, noun/verb, adverb/adjective and verb/adverb. Gitsaki

(1996:23) is able to define 37 categories of collocation, eight of which could be

considered as lexical collocation and 29 grammatical (she thus largely accepts the

structural view of collocation). Benson, Benson & Ilson (1997) in the BBI Dictionary of

English Word Combinations differentiate between lexical and grammatical collocation as

Bahns above, and designate eight main kinds of grammatical collocation and seven kinds

of lexical (1986/1997: xv-xxxiii).

Collocational study in this structural category has looked both at the collocation of

grammatical classes of words (Kjellmer 1987, 1990), and, more significantly for this

research, also how grammar is integrated into lexis and vice versa through collocation

68 The importance of grammatical collocation was discussed by Greenbaum (1970). Interestingly, and perhaps oddly by today’s criteria, Greenbaum rejected corpus linguistic approaches to the study of collocation, using instead native speaker informants and a variety of tests to judge collocational awareness. He also restricted his study to verb-intensifier collocations.

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and patterning (Sinclair 1991, Renouf & Sinclair 1991, Hunston et al. 1997, Hunston &

Francis 1998, Hoey 1997, 2000).

Grammatical word classes: In terms of looking at classes of words, Kjellmer, using a

tagged corpus (the Brown Corpus) set out to establish ‘to what extent individual word-

classes are ‘collocational’ or ‘non-collocational’ in character’ (Kjellmer 1990:164). The

results of his study showed that articles, prepositions, singular and mass nouns and the

base forms of verbs were collocational in nature, whereas adjectives, single proper nouns

and adverbs were not (1990:185). It is important to remember here that collocation is

defined in a grammatical sense, thus the base forms of verbs, for example, are seen as

‘collocable’ because they occur often in the infinitive form and so must collocate with

‘to’ or a modal auxiliary. Kjellmer concludes his article discussing the gradation of

collocation:

There is a continuum in English words .... from those whose contextual company is entirely predictable (Angeles, Fidel)69 to those whose contextual company is entirely unpredictable (therefore), but the evidence indicates that most words are to be found towards the Angeles end of the scale.70 (Kjellmer 1990:172)

Lexical and grammatical integration: Perhaps a better term for a lot of the work on

collocations that considers both grammatical and lexical elements might be the

integrated approach. Sinclair, the leading exponent of this view, did not always see

grammar and lexis as inseparable and it is interesting to note that his views have changed

since the 1966 article, where he still kept grammar and lexis apart.71 However, his later

work integrates grammar and lexis and examines the generative power of grammatical

words. For example, Renouf & Sinclair (1991) examined the generative power of

69 Kjellmer had referred earlier in the article to Los Angeles and Fidel Castro and how the presence of one part of each of these words presupposes the other. 70 The concept of strong or loose collocation, which has also been the concern of studies into lexical collocation and will be returned to shortly.71 See Owen (1993) for discussion on this.

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collocational frameworks such as a + ? + of and be + ? + to and found them to be a key

part of language creation.72

Other writers, too, have noted the interrelationship of grammar and lexis (Hunston et al.

1997, Hunston & Francis 1998). Working with the COBUILD 250 million word corpus,

Hunston et al. found a distinct correlation between grammatical patterning and lexical

meaning. They say that their work ‘does not rely on a distinction between grammar and

vocabulary, but provides connections between the two’ (1997:208). They go on to

elucidate: ‘There are two main points about patterns to be made: firstly, that all words

can be described in terms of patterns; secondly, that words which share patterns also

share meanings’ (Hunston et al.1997:209). They continue:

Although some senses of some words have several patterns, some senses have only one pattern and are identified by it. This means that a word only means a particular thing when it is used with a particular word. (Hunston et al.1997:209)

The relationship between lexis and grammar found by the work Hunston and Francis

forms a central part of the analysis of business lexis in this thesis. Lexis is not regarded

as separate from grammar and vice versa - rather, the thesis attempts to see how they

interact in the business lexical environment.

The work of Hunston et al. is re-inforced by Hoey (1997, 2000), who found that certain

senses of a word will have their own grammatical patterning or colligation. These last

aspects of the relationship between grammar and lexis will be returned to in discussing

both the concept of colligation and longer collocations or multi-word units later in this

chapter. However, before that, further elements of collocation that are important to this

thesis are briefly reviewed. Whilst each section considers a separate element, it must be

stressed that all these parts go to make the whole that is collocation.

4.3.3 Key elements of collocation

72 This article will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter.

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The key elements of collocation presented here relate to the following: the notion of

upward and downward collocation; the strength of collocation - from strong to weak and

from fixed to free-form; the notion of collocational span; collocation as an embodiment

of the idiom principle (Sinclair 1987, 1991) and, finally, the relationship of collocations,

the idiom principle and Business English. The review begins with a further connection

between grammar, lexical (semantic-based) words and collocation - the notion of upward

and downward collocation.

4.3.3.1 The notion of upward and downward collocation

Firth (1951/7) saw that the possible collocates for words are limited, sometimes even

very strictly limited and this chapter has shown that these collocates can be both

grammatical and lexical. A further distinction that needs to be made in relation to lexical

and grammatical aspects of collocation is put forward by Sinclair (1991:115-116) -

upward and downward collocation.

Upward collocation: This concept basically states that words will habitually collocate

with other words that are more frequently used than they are themselves in the English

language. For example, Sinclair notes that the word back collocates with at, down, from,

into, on and then, all of which are more frequent words than back.

Downward collocation: Similarly, words will also habitually collocate with words that

are less frequent than they are. Again, Sinclair uses the example of the word back giving

arrive, bring and climbed as examples of less frequently occurring words that collocate

with back.

There is, however, a difference in the grammatical nature of the collocates these two

types of collocation attract:

There appears to be a systematic difference between upward and downward collocation. Upward collocation, of course, is the weaker pattern in statistical terms, and the words tend to be elements of grammatical frames, or superordinates. Downward collocation by

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contrast gives us a semantic analysis of a word. (Sinclair 1993:116)

In terms of grammatical classes, therefore, Sinclair notes the collocates of back: upward

collocates are, for example, prepositions, adverbs, conjunctions and pronouns, whilst

downward collocates consist of a large number of nouns and verbs.

Clear (1993), in his research on the word taste using MI and t-score statistics, confirms

Sinclair’s views on the grammatical classes of words found in upward and downward

collocation. However, he does not go as far as Sinclair in saying that downward

collocation gives a semantic analysis of a word. He found that some upward collocates

can also help in the semantic analysis of a word (here the word taste):

Many of the pairs identified by the t-score are upward collocations, andseveral of these are indicators of the different senses of taste which onewould expect to find discriminated in a dictionary. (Clear 1993:281)

The phenomena of upward and downward collocation was also noted in this research into

Business English and will be briefly discussed again (see Key word 1.9 boss in

Appendix 6 in Vol. II). At the beginning of this section on collocation, the distinction

between reciprocal and non-reciprocal collocation was made. This now needs to be

considered in more detail and forms the next key element of collocation discussed here.

4.3.3.2 The strength of collocations

It can be deduced from the work of Kjellmer (1990), discussed above in Section 4.3.2

that there is a continuum of collocability, from words that always collocate with a given

other word (e.g. vested interest, moot point) to words that are more free and

unpredictable in their partners (e.g. therefore) - a point also discussed by Widdowson

(1989:133). Kjellmer’s ideas of collocation may be represented thus:

Free choice ---------->------------>-------------> Closed classesword classes fixed collocation

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Fig. 20 KjellmerÕs (1990) ideas on collocational fixedness

Whilst Kjellmer was concerned with grammatical classes, the same phenomenon is

equally relevant to studies of lexical collocations. Study of lexical collocation can also

produce a sliding scale of collocability, though lexical collocates are not tied in like

manner to collocation between certain grammatical classes, but the focus is more on the

level of semantics. The cline can be represented as follows:73

Weak ------->--------->-----> Medium strength ----->-----> Strongcollocation collocation collocation

Fig. 21 A sliding scale of collocability

It is important to note here two things: firstly collocations in this sense are not idioms -

the meaning of the partnership of words is transparent and can be deduced from its

constituent parts, whereas this cannot be said of idioms.74 Secondly, most collocations lie

in the middle ground of the cline: there are relatively few very strong collocations (Lewis

& Hill 1998:2-3). Lewis & Hill determine three grades of collocation: strong collocations

(avid reader, budding author), common words that collocate widely (fast car, have

dinner, a bit tired) and medium strength collocations (magnificent house, significantly

different, relatively strong) which they say make up the majority of collocations

necessary for language learners to know. Hill (1999) adds one more to these categories:

that of unique collocations such as foot the bill, shrug oneÕs shoulders. Thus, whilst the

collocation of words is on a sliding scale of fixedness from totally free to totally fixed,

the majority of collocates, it is suggested, can be found somewhere in the middle of this

spectrum.

All the examples of collocation given so far in this chapter show collocates of words that

immediately precede or follow each other. This close proximity of collocating words

presents, perhaps, the most accessible definition of collocation. Yet there has been a

73 Conzett (2000:74) gives a similar diagram but with actual examples, going from old car at the weak end of the scale to Stars and Stripes at the other. 74 This is dealt with in much more detail in the section on multi-word items.

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long-standing discussion in the literature on what is known as collocational span - the

notion that words can be considered collocates even if they are two, four or even eight

words away from the head word under examination. The next section, therefore, looks at

this discussion.

4.3.3.3 The notion of collocational span - what makes a collocation ?

The quotations which this section on collocation started with refer to the co-occurrence

of words, but there is little specification of what this actually means in practice. Scott

(1999) notes that

The literature on collocation has never distinguished very satisfactorily between collocates which we think of as ÔassociatedÕ with a word (letter - stamp) on the one hand, and on the other, the words which do actually co-occur with the word (letter - my, this, a, etc.). We could call the first type Ôcoherence collocatesÕ and the second Ôneighbourhood collocatesÕ or Ôhorizon collocatesÕ.

(Scott 1999 WordSmith 3 Help File )

ScottÕs observation is indeed shown clearly in the literature. In 1966, Sinclair and

Halliday had set no limit on collocational span. Sinclair already then realised that years

of study would be needed in order to set the optimal span and stated, therefore, that ‘we

reject, for the moment, the suggestion that degree of proximity within the chosen

boundaries of collocation should be considered of primary importance’ (Sinclair

1966:414). Sinclair gave examples of the words post, letter and pillar box (Sinclair

1966:413), noting the inherent connection between these words: where there is one, it is

expected to find the other. However, in 1966, there was no way of statistically

determining the relationship between them. Thus, Sinclair chose a 3:3 span to study the

collocates of money, pay and ticket in the same article. By 1991, Sinclair was operating

with a 4:4 span and mentions that he was still engaged in research to see what would be

the optimal setting for searching out collocates (1991:106). Clear (1993) stated that

Intuitively, one would expect that a given node word would associate more strongly with immediately adjacent words,and that the associative link would be weak or non-existent

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the further removed are the collocating words. (Clear 1993:276)Thus both Clear and Sinclair (in practice) are concerned with the ‘neighbourhood’

collocates of Scott. In contrast, Scott (1997) suggests a concept of associates which ties

in closely in definition with Sinclair’s early consideration of examples such as post, letter

and pillar box. Unlike the pre-computer days of 1966, Scott’s (1999) computerised

lexical analysis software75 is able to generate the associates of words - that is, words that

co-occur with the head word within the same text or texts to a pre-determined statistical

significance. These associate words may or may not occur in close proximity of the node

word - habitual occurrence is enough (Scott 1999). Scott (1997) remarks that this idea is

very close to the original 1950s - 1960s definition of collocation and notes that ‘co-

associates are not the same as Firthian collocates, but they represent a level of lexical

patterning which inherits from Firth’s traditions’ (1997:240). Sinclair, too, had clearly

recognised the possibility of this kind of lexical relationship, as was mentioned above,

but saw no way of actually achieving an analytical framework for it.

This thesis adopts an approach that takes into account both aspects of collocation: both

the ‘neighbourhood’ collocates and associates ‘which are a pointer to coherence

collocates’ (Scott 1999) are studied. ScottÕs associates are computed for key business

lexis in order to gain a clearer picture of the lexical environment of Business English.

However, the main focus of the research has been on neighbourhood collocates.76

The discussion on collocation has thus far centred on more technical elements of its

nature. Discussion now turns to a more general, but perhaps more important level. In the

following sections, collocation will be linked to work done by Sinclair (1987, 1991) on

the idiom principle and also show how research has combined aspects of the idiom

principle, collocation and Business English.

75 WordSmith Tools 3 (1999), Oxford: Oxford University Press. 76 Care needs to be taken here for grammatical and syntactical reasons. Collocating words can be separated by syntactical intervention yet still be clearly seen to collocate. An example would be: We had to adjourn what had been a very long, dull and tortuous meeting. The quite acceptable verb/noun collocation of adjourn a meeting is here separated by nine words, both grammatical and lexical. A definition of collocation that rigidly sticks to a 2:2 or even 5:5 span of words - that is 2 or 5 words either side of the node - will miss occurrences of this nature. Thus larger spans are also used in this research to gain neighbourhood collocates.

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4.3.3.4 Collocation as an embodiment of the ‘idiom principle’

It has been noted in the literature that the study of collocation has presented certain

theoretical problems in that it does not, or has not fitted into accepted models of

linguistic description. Clear notes

The study of collocation as a linguistic phenomenon has not found a central place in theoretical linguistics, perhaps because its proper province is the rather ill-defined area of linguistic patterning that is neither clearly syntactic nor clearly semantic. (Clear 1993:271)

However, a clear methodological grounding can be offered for collocation by viewing it

as a natural part of the idiom principle. This notion of the idiom principle was first put

forward by Sinclair in 1987 and again in Corpus, Concordance, Collocation in 1991,77 as

well as in other articles, for example, Renouf & Sinclair (1991).

Renouf & Sinclair (1991) examined the generative power of collocational frameworks

such as a + ? + of and be + ? + to. They found that some of the triplets were commonly

subsumed as part of a larger lexical unit. They went on to explain this phenomenon by

saying that it can be seen as ‘a series of collocational units flowing into each other - that

in fact, the last element or elements of one frame form the beginning of the next’

(Renouf & Sinclair 1991:140). These collocational units are then available for the

language user:

The principle of idiom is that a language user has available to him or her a large number of semi-preconstructed phrases that constitute single choices, even though they might appear to be analysable into segments. (Sinclair 1991:110)

This, obviously, is very different to the traditional ‘slot and filler’ grammatical approach

to linguistic description where grammatical structure is seen as paramount. Sinclair

elaborates on this theme (Sinclair 1991:110-115) and contrasts the idiom principle with

77 The quotations given here are from the 1991 book, but could just as well be from the 1987 article as much of the text is the same.

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what he calls the open principle. The open principle represents the traditional way of

viewing language where text is seen ‘as the result of a large number of complex choices.

At each point where a unit is completed (a word or a phrase or a clause), a large choice

opens up and the only restraint is grammaticalness’ (1991:109). Sinclair rejects this

model as a single explanation of language: on its own it is not enough. The open

principle does not account for the fact that linguistic choice is not random in the

language:

It is clear that words do not occur at random in a text, and that the open-choice principle does not provide for substantial enough restraints on consecutive choices. (Sinclair 1991:110)

He goes on to say

Once a register choice is made, and these are normally social choices, then all the slot-by-slot choices are massively reduced in scope or even, in some cases, pre-empted. (Sinclair 1991:110)

Even allowing for register, there is still too much choice available in the open model.

Sinclair stresses the fact that most language use is made up of idiom principle usage with

occasional ‘switches’ to the open principle. The two definitions of language are thus

Ôdiametrically opposedÕ and there is no shading of one to the other (1991:114).

The idiom principle is a rejection of ChomskyÕs dualist approach to language analysis

and its focus on collocation and prefabricated language provides a firm methodological

basis for this work. This methodological base has been more recently analysed in work

that brings together the concepts of collocation, the idiom principle and Business

English.

4.3.3.5 Collocation, the idiom principle and Business English

The idea of limited collocational choice, central to the idiom principle discussed above,

can be traced back to the writings of J.R. Firth. Firth had noted in 1957 that collocations

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‘will often be found to be characteristic and help justify the restriction of the field’

(1957:180). It could thus be expected, therefore, that in Business English, collocational

limitation could be found. This limitation is noted by Alejo & McGinity (1997), who

suggest that when choosing vocabulary we

... use the idiom principle, that is, we severely limit the choice of what comes next. This tendency is very important where business English is concerned, for in this discipline concordance and collocation are considerably limited. (Alejo & McGinity 1997:216)

For Alejo & McGinity, then, one of the possible characteristics of the semantic field of

Business English may be the limitation imposed on choice of collocations. They even

give examples of them, e.g. domestic consumption, capital equipment, framework

agreement. They also specify a group of words which almost always appear together, for

example, input / output, supply /demand, gross /net, and import /export (1997:226).78

The importance of collocation in Business English is reiterated by Conzett (2000:81)

when she says that ‘Perhaps the very nature of ... business training - the pragmatic and

functional notions ... puts collocations at the forefront of its language work; certainly the

relevant books and training materials emphasize lexical phrases as a matter of course’.

Yet the abundance of business-related collocations in Business English is called into

question by Berber Sardinha (1994 a,b,c) in work that combines aspects of collocation,

the idiom principle and Business English.

In a series of three articles in 1994, Berber Sardinha looked at collocation and the idiom

principle in relation to the Business English environment. It is worth looking in detail at

these short studies because, although confirming the idiom principle, they do point to

certain problems with it. Berber Sardinha (1994a) considered the lexical patterns for the

word year in Annual Business Reports. Berber Sardinha believed that ‘users that share

the same discourse community make choices in terms of constantly selecting ‘semi-

reconstructed phrases’, they shape up a text type’ (1994a:2). Thus certain key linguistic

78 They suggest that as this group appear commonly in pairs, students can more easily acquire them in pairs.

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choices can be expected to be made in genre-specific texts - in this case annual business

reports, because

... each word is to be considered a node exerting influence within a given radius around it; and the words which fall within that radius are also nodes with other areas of influence around them, and so on. The organization of language as envisioned by the idiom principle is really a recursive set of overlapping territories having as their centers lexical items which constrain each othersÕ territories

(Berber Sardinha 1994a:2)

Berber Sardinha used 17 annual reports from a larger corpus of 74. The word year was

the most common lexical item in the reports and he was able to find recurring patterns

for its use. He concluded that ‘these patterns are made up in such a way that each of their

constituents selects which word or, sometimes, which grammatical category will

accompany them. Therefore, these lexical patterns in the text analyzed do not seem to fit

into the traditional structural descriptions which prescribe that as far as lexis goes, each

choice is free’ (1994a:4-5). This short piece of research, therefore, confirms the use of

the idiom principle in this environment.

This theme was continued in the second article (Berber Sardinha 1994b), where he

considered pragmatic problems in determining the accuracy of the idiom principle. These

problems related to the bidirectionality of collocates, the notion of lemma and the

difficulty in delimiting the end of one collocate and the beginning of another.

Bidirectionality: If it can be assumed that words engender collocates, there arises the

problem of bidirectionality in that it may be difficult to determine the ‘exact domain of

the collocation, since collocations can be seen to form in both directions of the node’

(1994b:2).

Lemmas: Additionally, problems are presented when deciding whether members of the

same lemma79 group should be treated only as part of the lemma, or whether they should

be treated as separate and analysed as independent collocates.

79 Lemma is a term that will be dealt with in more detail later in this thesis. In this instance a lemma is taken to be a head word to which is added grammatical derivations that are found within the same word class. For example, the lemma GO, when lemmatised, will have attached to it went and gone.

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Delimitation: ‘collocates also nest inside each other, making the delimitation of each one

rather difficult’ (1994b:2).

Despite presenting these problems, Berber Sardinha does not really give any answer to

them in his study which takes, rather, a short news story from a Brazilian newspaper for

analysis. The news story was analysed by identifying the flow and limits of collocations

in the text:

The frequencies were counted for the first collocation as it began with the first word of the text, and followed until a frequency of 1 was found, signalling a Ôfree choiceÕ. At that point another collocation was considered to have begun and the process of finding the frequencies from left to right resumed. (Berber Sardinha 1994b:5)

The results of the study showed that ‘there are both long and short collocations and a

consistent sub-patterning. One can also identify free choices that mark the end of several

collocations’ (1994b:8). Predictably, short collocations were found to be much more

frequent than long ones. A further interesting finding was that some words act as Ôflow

barriersÕ (1994b:8) demarcating the span of one collocational chain on one side of it and

the start of another chain on the other. This ‘discourse’ collocational function would

certainly warrant further detailed analysis. Berber Sardinha’s study again supports the

idiom principle view ‘ÔFree choicesÕ, or word sequences that have not occurred

elsewhere in the corpus are very few’ (1994b:11) and that ‘connected discourse seems to

flow by means of several interlocking semi-fabricated word sequences’ (1994b:11).

In the final article, which examined introduction sections in annual reports, two

additional points of interest can be found. Firstly, that ‘business language’, at least that

found in the text under discussion, was mostly made up of collocations common to

general English. On top of this were sprinkled ‘choices that are specific to the

phraseology which one would by experience associate with annual business reports’

(1994c:10). Secondly, Berber Sardinha noted the role of intertextuality in that ‘texts are

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shaped by prior texts, by repetitions or by being oriented to routines and conventions’

(1994c:12).

Berber SardinhaÕs point, that most collocations found in the Business English

environment can be considered to belong to general English, has also been found in this

study. However, it is argued in this thesis that the importance of these subject-specific

collocations outweighs their frequency. It will be seen that as this research is based on

unusual frequency, as opposed to actual frequency, the collocates of business, though not

necessarily of high overall frequency, do in fact occur significantly more often in

Business English than in general English and are, therefore, important for learners.

4.3.3.6 Collocation and beyond

This last section has been concerned with defining collocation as it has been found in the

literature and how it has been placed at the centre of the idiom principle. At the end of

this second part of the chapter, a working definition of collocation for the purposes of

this thesis will be presented. However, before this can be done, it is important to look

‘beyond collocation’ (Hoey 2000) and see how collocates form into what are known as

semantic prosodies.

4.4 Semantic Prosody

Semantic prosody, put simply, refers to the fact that words, as well as collocating with a

given other word (e.g. as when arms collocates with akimbo), can also collocate with

semantic classes of words that are often either positive or negative in meaning.80

Semantic prosody is a concept only recently ÔdiscoveredÕ as the advent of computerised

studies into language was needed before these semantic patterns could be noticed.

Semantic prosody has been defined variously by Sinclair (1991) - though not named as

80 An example of this might be the verb to commit. The word commit is followed most commonly by words that refer to a crime or a negative act of some kind: commit a foul, commit a transgression, commit a sin. Thus, the focus here is on the class of words following the word commit, rather than on a particular collocate (see Lewis 2000:137 for more on this).

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such, Louw (1993), Stubbs (1995), Tribble (1998) and Hoey (1997, 2000). Each

definition is basically the same, but the scope of semantic prosody has been expanded by

each new definition.

Sinclair (1991) noted the fact that certain words seemed to collocate with semantic

classes of other words that were decidedly either positive or negative.

Many uses of words and phrases show a tendency to occur in a certain semantic environment. For example, the verb happen is associated with unpleasant things - accidents and the like.

(Sinclair 1991:112)

However, Sinclair never came out publicly with the term semantic prosody and it was not

until 1993 that it was first discussed in any detail by Louw as a concept in its own right. 81

Louw states that semantic prosody is the ‘consistent aura of meaning with which a form

is imbued by its collocates’ (Louw 1993:157). In his article, Louw concentrated on the

use of irony in poetry and showed how the use of semantic prosody creates a mood or

atmosphere within the poem that adds to its meaning and its effectiveness. It is the very

fact that the prosodies are so strong and fixed in the language, for example the negative

prosody of the word utterly used by poet Phillip Larkin, that they can be used to such

dramatic effect. Louw also noted a correlation between semantic prosody and grammar:

... prosodies based on very frequent forms can bifurcate into ‘goodÕ and ‘bad’, using a grammatical principle like transitivity in order to do so. For example, where build up is used transitively, with a human subject, the form of the prosody is uniformly good....Where things or forces, such as cholesterol, toxins, and armaments build up intransitively, of their own accord, they are uniformly bad.

(Louw 1993:171)

Just as in the idiom principle, language is seen to flow on from one ‘chunk’ to the next.

Louw concludes his article by noting:

First, it is clear that in many cases semantic prosodies ‘hunt in packs’ and potentiate and bolster one another in rather the same way that

81 Louw was given the term originally by John Sinlcair in a private communication as early as 1988.

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images are forced to cluster in poetry in order to prevent full ‘intuitive’ meaning from ebbing away into delexical meaning.

(Louw 1993:172)

The notion of semantic prosody was taken up and expanded by Stubbs (1995) who

suggested that as well as collocating with purely positive or negative semantic groupings

of words, words can also collocate with semantic sets:

Semantic prosodies may be of a very general kind: such as the shared semantic feature ‘unpleasant’. Alternatively, one may be able to predict that a node will most likely co-occur with collocates from a restricted lexical set: for example, from the semantic field of ‘care’.

(Stubbs 1995:249)

Stubbs studied several words using two separate corpora and was able to assign their

collocates to either positive, negative or to a lexical set. For example, the word job he

found to be both positive and negative whilst career was only positive (1995:253) and

the word unemployment was found to collocate with the semantic set of statistics

(1995:254). Both Louw and Stubbs also realised the theoretical problems that a concept

like this poses - at present there is no linguistic theory that adequately explains it:

It is a purely lexical, yet syntagmatic, relation, of a type which cannot be captured by current descriptive theory. Indeed it undermines conventional views on the relation between syntagmatic and paradigmatic. In addition the statements which I have given are probabilistic. Again, conventional linguistic description usually assumes categorical relations between units, and has no theory of typicality. (Stubbs 1995:255)

Despite the difficulties at the level of linguistic theory, Stubbs does offer a use for

semantic prosody at a more pragmatic level, saying that ‘one might start to use such

descriptive methods for integrating semantic, pragmatic, and cultural information into

language teaching materials’ (1995:256).82

This call for a practical usage of semantic prosody was answered by Tribble (1998), who

argued that it can play an important role in the teaching of written genres. He proposed

82 This research has taken up StubbsÕ suggestion, and use of semantic prosody has been made for the development of Business English materials.

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that the semantic prosodies of a given word are both universal and local, that is, there

may be a global semantic prosody for a word in relation to the whole language, but that

in a given context or genre, there may be a local semantic prosody that is only to be

found there. Thus, it is ‘proposed that words in certain genres may establish local

semantic prosodies which only occur in these genres, or analogues of these genres’

(Tribble 1998:11). As an example, Tribble analysed the use of the word experience in a

corpus of European Union Phare proposals and was able to show that there is a local

meaning used in this genre of experience as ‘professional capital’. This definition of the

word is not to be found in any dictionary.

Hoey, in two articles (1997, 2000), largely concurs with former definitions of semantic

prosody, but criticises both Sinclair and Louw in terms of semantic prosody:

Louw’s term is potentially a helpful one but we need to broaden the category a little. Sinclair (1991), who does not use the term, discusses the phenomenon under the heading of the idiom principle, but this is not a satisfactory categorisation, since there is no requirement that a semantic-prosodic association should be in the case of any particular item a regular association. When a new disease is found, it can immediately be added, for example, to the list of things that can be caused; we do not have to wait until it has become a common enough disease for it to figure in calculations of collocations. (Hoey 1997:2)

This is an interesting point. Louw had suggested that the fact that prosodies are built up

over time gave them their power, for example, to use them to display irony. However,

HoeyÕs point is not at odds if it is considered at the level of lexical set or category,

rather than at the level of word and individual collocates. Thus, whilst an individual word

may be new to a language, as in the case of a disease, it falls into the category of

ÔdiseaseÕ and therefore joins the prosodic group of ÔdiseasesÕ with little trouble. In the

sentence: She came down with a bad case of flu it can easily be extended to She came

down with a bad case of disease X. 83 This aspect, Hoey says, is why semantic prosody is

83 Once again here, of course, one does run into collocative limitations, as one can only say e.g. I came down with a bad case of flu, but not I came down with a bad case of cancer. The number of types of disease are, therefore, limited with the expression I came down with.

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so important: ‘what makes the notion so useful and important is that it cannot be

subsumed by its collocations’ (Hoey 1997:2). He goes on to say:

I am suggesting that semantic prosody is the label that we might generally give to answers to the question ÔDoes the word regularly associate with other meanings?Õ (Hoey 1997:2)

In Hoey (2000) a teaching-orientated, pragmatic approach is taken towards the use of

semantic prosody. His article criticises present EFL vocabulary textbooks for presenting

language that is not typical of actual use. He analyses the word chilly and suggests that ‘if

a learner wants to learn chilly they would do best to learn that it occurs in certain kinds of

context rather than all contexts’ (Hoey 2000:232-233). Hoey does not stop at semantic

prosody though. The survey of collocation in this chapter has shown that lexis and

grammar are interrelated. Hoey realises that semantic prosody alone is not enough to

account for the typical patterning of words, and that the concept of colligation is also

required. A review of this concept forms the next section of the chapter and is divided

into discussion on the more technical aspects of colligation and then its pedagogical

implications.

4.5 Colligation

4.5.1 Technical aspects of colligation

Colligation was another major idea first put forward by Firth (1957), and Hoey provides

a straightforward definition: ‘Colligation can be defined as Ôthe grammatical company a

word keeps and the positions it prefersÕ; in other words, a wordÕs colligations describe

what it typically does grammatically’ (Hoey 2000:234 - Hoey’s use of bold). Thus,

colligation is a similar idea to collocation, but with a different emphasis. For example,

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Hargreaves (2000:213) compares colligation to collocation ‘verb + to infinitive is a

colligation, dread + think a collocation which exemplifies the colligation’.

Colligation is concerned with the relationship between grammatical classes, whereas

collocation is concerned with the words that belong to these grammatical classes. Hoey

(1997) further divided colligation itself into two main classes:

Textual position: The notion that a lexical item may have a strong tendency to occur in a

certain textual position rather than others, e.g. at the beginning or end of a text.

Grammatical context: A lexical item will tend to ‘co-occur with a particular grammatical

category of items’ (1997:4). The implication of this is that when a word has more than

one sense, each sense is found in a different grammatical context, with sense and a

specific grammatical context in a direct relationship.

Looking at the second of these two categories, Hoey examined the word reason and its

relationship to specific deictics (e.g. this, that, whichever, his, her) and to non-specific

deictics (e.g. each, every, some, any). He found that, for example, when reason was used

in the ÔcauseÕ sense of the word - i.e. the reason for something - it occurred with

demonstrative, but not possessive deictics. Further, the interrelationship between

colligation and semantic prosody was also noted:

...colligational and semantic prosody statements come together in some, in that in the structure for some <adj> reason, there is a strong prosodic tendency for the adjective to express the strangeness of the reason. Out of 104 adjectives occurring between some and reason, 87 expressed the oddness, the inexplicability or the craziness of the reason. (Hoey 1997:5)

Hoey then presented what he termed the ÔDrinking ProblemÕ hypotheses:

a) Where it can be shown that a common sense of a word favours common colligations, then the rare sense of that word will avoid those colligations.

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b) Where two senses of a word are approximately as common (or as rare) as each other then both will avoid colligational patterns of the other. c) Where either (a) or (b) do not apply, the effect will be humour, ambiguity (momentary or permanent), or a new meaning combining the two senses. (Hoey 1997:6)

Hoey analysed the word cause in order to prove/disprove these hypotheses (the first two

only) and found them to be correct. His analysis further showed that prosodic and

colligational elements intertwine to the extent that they cannot be separated. For

example, the word cause is in a colligational relationship with for and together they link

up to form idioms, e.g. cause for concern which is part of the negative semantic prosody:

Ôcause + for + something negativeÕ (e.g. cause for alarm, cause for concern).

4.5.2 Pedagogy and colligation

Hoey continued the theme of colligation in Hoey (2000), but this time from a more

pedagogical perspective. His criticisms of teaching materials in this article were noted

earlier, where he suggested that learners be presented with words as they naturally occur.

He continued the theme with a colligational analysis of different professions: accountant,

actor, actress, architect and carpenter. Despite the similarity of category, Hoey found

that all these lexical items behave differently in terms of the grammatical company they

keep:

The word carpenter has a much higher likelihood of occurring with an indefinite article or in parenthesis ... than does, say, architect. The word accountant is much more likely to occur with a classifier ... and actress is more likely to appear in apposition. (Hoey 2000:235)

Hoey suggests that this kind of information needs to be relayed to students and presents

ideas related to teaching colligation through concordancing (Hoey 2000:238-242). This

pedagogical emphasis is shared by Hargreaves in the same volume when he notes that in

the relationship between collocation and colligation: ‘knowledge of a collocation, if it is

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to be used appropriately, necessarily involves knowledge of the patterns or colligations in

which that collocation can occur acceptably’ (2000:214).

Other pedagogical work has also been done. Comprehensive cataloguing of the

relationship between meaning and grammatical patterning has been carried out by the

COBUILD team (Francis et al. 1996a, 1996b) where the grammatical patterning of verbs

and nouns have been matched to related meaning. These works take the form of student

reference books so that previous theoretical work can find its way into the classroom, and

they have been utilised in this thesis in the analysis of lexico-grammatical patterning in

Business English.

In summary, it is suggested here that word sense, meaning and grammatical patterning

are all interrelated and this interrelation is important for learners to grasp in order to be

able to produce fluent and appropriate English.

4.6 A final view of collocation, colligation and semantic prosody

Firth (1957) suggested that ‘In the study of selected words, compounds and phrases in a

restricted language for which there are restricted texts, an exhaustive collection of

collocations must first be made. It will then be found that meaning by collocation will

suggest a small number of groups of collocations for each word studied’ (Firth

1957:181). This process of investigating collocation and collocational groups is central to

this thesis.

The previous discussion on both collocation, semantic prosody and colligation now

allows the following working definitions and applications to be made:

1. Collocation is regarded in this study as the habitual co-occurrence of words with each

other on the syntagmatic level. This co-occurrence can be both reciprocal and unilateral.

2. The study features both lexical and grammatical collocation.

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3. The definition of collocation presented here takes in the ÔtraditionalÕ view of nodal

span with study using a 5:5 span.84 However, the associates of Scott (1997, 1999) will

also be featured in the analysis.

4. Collocates are organised by the wider factor of semantic prosody. Semantic prosody is

defined as occurring when ‘a word associates with a particular set of meanings’ (Hoey

2000:232). Therefore, not only negative or positive prosodies, but also words’

associations with lexical and semantic sets form a central part of the research.

5. Collocation is seen within the wider theoretical setting of the idiom principle.

6. Colligation is considered as the typical grammatical patterning that a word is found in.

Thus rather than looking at pure word class colligation, this study looks at the typical

grammatical patternings of key Business English words and the relationships these

patterns form with specific meanings.

This last section has focused on language at the level of individual collocates, where one

word collocates with another. Yet another aspect of language central to the idiom

principle is the notion of even longer ‘chunks’ of language which have been variously

known as prefabricated phrases, multi-word items and word clusters. The next part of the

chapter, therefore, focuses on this aspect of language.

4.7 Multi-word items, prefabrication and the lexical approach

4.7.1 Introduction

The idea that language is learned in a series of pre-fabricated blocks or chunks is

commonly associated with post-1970s language methodology. However, like several

84 Attention will be paid here to collocates of a wider span in relation to the syntactic separation of collocates noted earlier.

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other ideas related to lexis this, too, is not a new idea. Thomas Prendergast (1806-1886)85

noted that children learn not just words, but ÔchunksÕ of language and can make use of

them fluently in their speech. ‘They [these pre-fabricated chunks] seemed so well-learnt

that the only explanation he could offer was that they had been memorized as complete

units’ (Howatt 1984:157). Howatt goes on to quote from Prendergast as follows:

When they (i.e. the children) utter complete idiomatical sentences with fluency, with accurate pronunciation, and with decision, while they are still incapable of understanding any of the principles according to which they unconsciously combine their words in grammatical form, it is obvious that they must have learnt, retained, and reproduced them by dint of imitation and reiteration.

(Prendergast 1864:11 cited in Howatt 1984:157)

Despite this remarkably modern-sounding description of first language acquisition, it was

to be another hundred years86 before it was to become an accepted part of language

research and teaching methodology, where it has been subsumed as an integral part of

what has become known as the Lexical Approach to language teaching. This section of

the thesis will deal in some detail with the concept of pre-fabricated language and

chunks, and it may be useful at this point to specify exactly what will be discussed and

what will not. There is a wealth of literature in this area and so this section will

concentrate only on the following issues:

· an overview of definitions and types of multi-word items (MWIs) as found in the

literature

· characteristics of MWIs: fixedness and non-fixedness, form and function, competence

and performance

· pedagogical application of the above in the form of the Lexical Approach

Other important issues, those of first language acquisition, and the development of

collocational and MWI knowledge in second language learners will only be dealt with in

85 Quotes in Howatt (1984:157).86 Harold Palmer in the 1930s did discuss the idea of what he termed polylogs, mentioned briefly earlier. These were collocations and longer phrases that he regarded as fixed in the language. For more on this see Howatt (1984:237) and Kennedy (1992).

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relation to the issues listed above. This is not to belittle their importance, but this thesis is

less concerned with how people learn, and more with what they need to learn.87

4.7.2 What are multi-word items?

The definitions and terminology around multi-word items are disparate and confusing.

Moon notes ‘There are many different forms of multi-word item, and the fields of

lexicology and idiomatology have generated an unruly collection of names for them, with

confusing results’ (1997:43). She then attempts a definition:

A multi-word item is a vocabulary item which consists of a sequence of two or more words... This sequence of words semantically and/or syntactically forms a meaningful and inseparable unit. Multi-word items are the result of lexical (and semantic) processes of fossilisation and word-formation, rather than the results of the operation of grammatical rules. (Moon 1997:43)

In suggesting a definition for MWIs, Moon is drawing on a long tradition of creating

different terminology for describing essentially the same phenomenon.88 The more recent

notion of the importance of prefabricated language came from studies into first language

acquisition (e.g. Peters 1983, Krashen & Scarcella 1978). The idea was also discussed

by Corder (1973) who used the term holophrase to describe the phenomenon where

‘idioms, clichŽs, and non-canonical forms are stored as patterns’ (Nattinger 1980:338).

Since then, definitions have included gambits (Keller 1979), conventionalised language

forms (Yorio 1980), prefabricated language (Pawley & Syder 1983), fixed expressions

(Alexander 1984 and Cowie 1988), lexical phrases (Nattinger 1980, 1988, Nattinger &

DeCarrico 1992), ideational, interpersonal and relational expressions (Fernando 1996)

and word combinations (Howarth 1998). Other definitions of MWIs that will be

examined in this section are given by Kjellmer (1991), Lewis (1993, 1997), Weinert

(1995), Moon (1997) and Williams (1998). The next section reviews this varied literature

on MWIs, taking an essentially chronological perspective.

87 It must be admitted that the two aspects can hardly be seen as separate, finite categories, but is merely a matter of focus on one aspect rather than on the other.88 For an overview see Table V (p.195) later in this section.

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4.7.3 Gambits

One of the earlier works of note was that of Keller (1979) on gambits. Gambits were

described essentially as phrases used by speakers to introduce what they are about to say.

More specifically, Keller defined them as

... a certain set of signals in the conversationalistÕs speech, used to introduce level shifts within the conversation, or to prepare listeners for the next turn in the logical argument. (Keller 1979:220)

Keller had gathered authentic data of everyday Canadian speech and analysed the

transcripts to arrive at the concept of gambits. He stressed that gambits are not idioms,

but function at the Ôpsychological levelÕ of discourse in four main ways:

· Firstly as semantic framing whereby the speaker ‘delimits the type of discourse he is

choosing: questions, answers, exposition, digression etc.’ (1979:225). An example

would be when initiating a speech turn, a person would say This reminds me or

Speaking of.

· The second category signals social context, that is they ‘signal the speaker’s special

social role status, or his claim to such a status’ (1979:226). These include turn-taking

signals such as Wait a second, or May I interrupt you for a moment.

· The third category, state of consciousness signals, ‘indicates a person’s state of

consciousness concerning information, opinions or emotions’ (1979:228). Thus a

person can indicate they are ready to receive information by saying I’d like to know

more about.

· The final category is that of communication control signals that ‘serve to assure that

the listener is in a state of consciousness permitting the reception of the message’

(1979:229). Examples of this would be Are you following me? or Is that clear? Keller

noted that gambits force a top-down approach to looking at the whole of discourse and

that more research was needed.89

89 Keller later transferred this survey into teaching materials, first in Canada and then in the UK under the title Conversation Gambits (Keller & Warner 1988).

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The definitions of aspects of MWIs that followed KellerÕs are many and, as noted

above, confusing. They are laid out here in a more or less chronological order, though

there is some overlap. Each author is given a separate section. This leads to a discussion

in the second part of this section where the most important underlying factors involved in

the discussion on MWIs will be elucidated.

4.7.4 Other definitions of MWIs

Yorio: Yorio (1980) took a much broader view of MWIs than Keller had done, and

proposed the term conventionalised language forms to cover two areas of language:

idioms and routine formulas. Yorio saw language as arbitrary, but suggested that ‘a

certain form can be said to be conventional when it is predictable and expected by the

members of a speech community in a certain situation’ (1980:434). Routine formulas

were then broken down further into five categories (including the gambits of Keller), and

euphemisms. A key factor with regard to prefabricated language is also mentioned here -

that of the increased efficiency of language processing afforded by use of these blocks of

language:

Conventionalized forms make communication more orderly because they are regulatory in nature. They organize reactions and facilitate choices, thus reducing the complexity of communicative changes.90

(Yorio 1980:438)

Pawley & Syder: This notion of the way chunks of language speed up processing had

been made earlier by Peters (1983), who noted that children took advantage of chunks to

cope with an imbalance of memory capacity and processing speed. It was also noted by

Pawley & Syder (1983), who concluded that this does not detract from the creativity of

spoken discourse but rather that ‘Freed from the task of composing such sequences word-

by-word, so to speak, the speaker can channel his energies into other activities’ (Pawley

& Syder 1983:208). In their 1983 article, Pawley & Syder were trying to understand two

key abilities of native speakers of a language: nativelike selection - the native speaker’s

ability to produce not just grammatical but also ‘nativelike’ sentences and nativelike

90 The way in which conventionalised forms speed language processing is a central part of the lexical approach discussed later in this chapter.

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fluency - the native speaker’s ability ‘to produce fluent stretches of spontaneous

connected discourse’ (Pawley & Syder 1983:191). Their answer was that native speakers

utilise knowledge of a vast amount of pre-stored sentence stems which are

institutionalised or lexicalised. These are divided into:

· memorized sentences: for example, Can I come in?, There’s no pleasing some people,

which are part of a speaker’s ‘performanceÕ and;

· lexicalised stems: these belong to the realm of ‘competence’. Lexicalised stems,

unlike the memorized phrases, are capable of expansion and substitution. They give

the example of a base form (NP tell - TENSE the truth) and how it can be expanded:

Tell the truth/ Jo seldom tells the truth (1983:211).

Pawley & Syder continued by giving three criteria by which a sentence or sentence stem

is lexicalised:

1. it denotes a culturally accepted concept 2. it is recognized as a standard expression for the meaning in question3. it is a linguistically arbitrary choice (1983:211).

A lexicalised sentence or sentence stem can be a complete sentence or, more often, an

expression that is smaller than a complete sentence (1983:210). They can be, but are not

usually, true idioms. Rather they are more commonly literal expressions (i.e. their

meaning is clear from the words themselves). Pawley & Syder identify two main ways

by which native speakers integrate these lexical sentences into speech: a clause

integrating strategy, where the speaker takes account of previous and forthcoming

grammatical constructions, and secondly a clause chaining style where clauses are

‘strung’ together relatively independently of each other.

Alexander: Whilst Pawley & Syder saw both fixedness and flexibility within their lexical

phrases, other writers have wanted to stress the fixed aspect of MWIs. Alexander (1984),

in an article concerned with reference books and teaching with regard to fixed

expressions in English, described five broad categories of fixed expressions ‘ranging

from lexically-oriented idioms and their many subcategories, through discourse-

structuring devices, such as gambits and proverbs and proverbial idioms, to the more

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encyclopedia-oriented expressions such as catchphrases and quotations’ (Alexander

1984:128).

Cowie: Cowie (1988) also stressed the fixed nature of many expressions.91 He identified

two major groups of word combinations: pragmatically specialized combinations such as

in greetings - how are you ? and semantically specialized combinations such as kick

oneÕs heels and pass the buck which ‘have developed more or less unitary referential

meanings by virtue of their use as invariable units in grammatical constructions’ (Cowie

1988:133).

Nattinger & DeCarrico: Two of the most notable proponents of a lexical approach to

language research and teaching have been Nattinger & DeCarrico. As early as 1980

Nattinger had noted that ‘we need to pay more attention to the importance of

prefabricated speech routines in language behaviour’ (1980:337). In Nattinger

(1980,1988) and Nattinger & DeCarrico (1992), the various kind of lexical phrases, as

they term them, were elucidated. In the 1980/88 articles Nattinger placed lexical phrases

into the six categories shown here:

1. Polywords: short fixed phrases, whose meaning is often not analysable by the regular

rules of syntax. They can substitute for single words e.g. kick the bucket, powder room,

put up with.

2. Phrasal constraints: short, relatively fixed phrases with slots that permit some

variation.

3. Deictic locutions: short to medium length phrases of low variability to monitor

conversation, e.g. as far as I know, if I were you.

4. Sentence builders: phrases of up to sentence length - highly variable phrases

containing slots, e.g. not only X but Y.

5. Situational utterances: usually complete sentences e.g. IÕll see you next week.

6. Verbatim texts: e.g. numbers, alphabet, days of week, aphorisms and proverbs.

91 Cowie did not believe that all MWIs are fixed, but sees the fixedness of a large number of them as having great potential in teaching.

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By 1992 Nattinger & DeCarrico proposed a more refined definition. They firstly defined

lexical phrases in relation to collocation, distinguishing lexical phrases from collocations

by saying that

Prefabricated phrases are collocations if they are chunked sets of lexical items with no particular pragmatic functions; they are lexical phrases if they have such pragmatic function.

(Nattinger & DeCarrico 1992:37)

Thus a key aspect of MWIs for Nattinger & DeCarrico is their pragmatic function.92

Nattinger & DeCarrico (1992) continued by suggesting that lexical phrases can be

discerned according to four structural criteria:

· Firstly, length and grammatical status: how long they are and if they operate at word

or sentence level.

· Secondly, canonical/non-canonical shape: if the phrases conform to regular rules of

syntax in their formation or if they are deviant in some way. For example, the phrase

off with his head can be considered deviant (there is no verb) and therefore non-

canonical in shape.

· Thirdly, variable or fixed: if any variation is allowed in the lexical phrase or not. For

example, in the phrase hold your horses no variation is allowed, but in the phrase I

wouldn’t touch that with bargepole quite a lot of variation is allowed, whilst still

retaining its recognisable character.

· Finally, if a phrase is continuous or discontinuous: if there is an unbroken sequence of

words or if the phrase is interrupted by lexical fillers.

92 In this they fall into the third of three schools of research identified by Moon (1997). Moon distinguishes three different approaches that have been taken with regard to MWIs. Firstly, Semantic-based models that look at MWIs in terms of their degree of compositionality. Secondly, there have been Syntax based models that look at MWIs in terms of grammatical well-formedness. Finally, there have been the Functional models as exemplified by Pawley & Syder (1983) and, as mentioned above, Nattinger & DeCarrico (1992). Moon (1997:50) notes: ‘Here, multi-word items are integrated into the vocabulary in terms of their pragmatics. This leads to a more practical approach where multi-word items can be integrated into a dynamic model of language-in-use, rather than language-as-artefact, and seen as enabling devices.’

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Based on these four criteria, lexical phrases are then divided into four categories as

opposed to the six earlier. These are summarised in the figure below (Nattinger &

DeCarrico (1992:45):

TABLE IV: TYPES OF LEXICAL PHRASES DEFINED BY NATTINGER & DECARRICO (1992)

Type of phrase Grammatical level

Canonical/Non-Canonical

Variable/Fixed

Continuous/Discontinuous

Polywords word level both fixed continuousInstutionalizedexpressions

sentence level canonical fixed continuous

Phrasal constraints

word level both somewhat variable

mostly continuous

Sentence builders sentence level canonical highly variable often discontinuous

For the sake of clarity these categories are now further exemplified:

1. Polywords: ‘short phrases which function very much like individual lexical items’

(1992:38). They operate at the word as opposed to sentence level. Examples would be for

the most part, in a nutshell.

2. Institutionalised phrases: ‘lexical phrases of sentence length, usually functioning as

separate utterances’ (1992:39). Examples would be how do you do?, there you go, long

time no see.

3. Phrasal constraints: ‘short- to medium-length phrases associated with a wide variety

of functions. Examples would be a ____ ago, as I was ______, see you _______.

4. Sentence builders: ‘lexical phrases that provide the framework for whole sentences’

(1992:42). Examples would be I think (that) X _________, My point is that __________,

It’s only in X that Y ....

There are two points of note to be made here. Firstly, these categories are interrelated:

institutionalised phrases are sentence-level versions of polywords, and sentence builders

are sentence-level versions of phrasal constraints. Secondly, there are no sharp

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boundaries between these groups: ‘the differences between them are frequently ones of

degree rather than kind’ (1992:46).

Lewis: Lewis (1993:92-95) built on earlier work in the field using similar terminology to

Nattinger & DeCarrico. He sees both a pragmatic purpose and message-oriented purpose

for MWIs and suggests the following three categories of multi-word item.

1. Polywords: Short, 2- or 3-word compounds ranging from opaque to totally transparent

meaning. Examples would be taxi rank, record player, put off, of course.

2. Collocations: These range from free collocations (red car) to totally fixed collocations

(vested interest) - the latter category being one kind of polyword. Collocations are non-

reciprocal93 (as was noted by Kjellmer (1991) earlier) and are not pragmatically tied and

thus differ from the next category of institutionalised phrases.

3. Instutionalised expressions: These are pragmatic in character and ensure efficient

processing in speech and writing. These include three categories: firstly, short utterances:

Not yet, certainly not; sentence heads or frames: Sorry to interrupt, but can I just say ....

and finally full sentences with a readily identifiable pragmatic meaning.

Weinert: Most of the definitions have so far been quite complex and this perhaps led

Weinert (1995) to take a more simplistic view of categorisation:94

A variety of labels have been used to describe formulaic language:formulas, prefabricated or ready-made language, chunks, unanalysedlanguage or wholes, etc. I will use these terms interchangeably.

(Weinert 1995:182)

Fernando: A similar, more straightforward categorisation is presented by Fernando

(1996). Her study of idioms and idiomaticity presented three broad Hallidayan categories

that expressions can be placed in: ideational, interpersonal and relational. Ideational

93 Lewis notes the pedagogical importance of this: ‘if we wish to use words as pattern generating items, it will be important to identify those which most helpfully predict collocates’ (Lewis 1993:93). 94 Kjellmer (1991) also presented a relatively simple model of Ôtypes of set expressionsÕ: fossilized phrases, semi-fossilized and what he called ÔvariableÕ phrases. For more on this see Kjellmer (1991:112-114).

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expressions ‘contribute to the content of a discourse’ (1996:185). They function as

‘impressionistic packages of information’ (1996:188) and examples would be red

herring, spill the beans, walk on air and make up. Interpersonal expressions function as

organizers of interaction between language users, with greetings and farewells being the

most common. Relational expressions have a discourse function and ‘make explicit the

semantic unity of a discourse’ (1996:185). Examples would be phrases like in a jiffy,

round the clock, not only x but also y.

Moon: Simplicity of categorisation, however, is criticised by Moon (1997). Moon

herself identified three main criteria by which MWIs can be recognised:

1. Instiutionalisation: the degree to which an MWI is conventionalised in the language.

2. Fixedness: the degree to which it is frozen as a sequence of words.

3. Non-compositionality: ‘the degree to which an MWI cannot be interpreted on a

word-by-word basis, but has a specialised unitary meaning’ (Moon 1997:44). This is

usually semantic, as in kick the bucket but can also be grammatical and pragmatic, as in

of course (of course is ungrammatical).

Moon uses MWI as a superordinate term to cover several kinds of linguistic item, which

she then lists:

1. Compounds: The largest and most tangible group, but the least interesting. In this

category it is possible to see the movement of language at work, for example in the case

of car park - the words are slowly being pushed together to form a compound: car park,

car-park, carpark (1997:45). Moon continues by saying that ‘Compounds are generally

fixed but their institutionalisation can vary as widely as any other lexical items. The

degree to which they are compositional varies too’(1997:45).

2. Phrasal verbs: combinations of verbs and particles: bring out, send back, head off.

3. Idioms: ‘multi-word items that are not the sum of their parts: they have holistic

meanings which cannot be retrieved from the individual meanings of the component

words’ (1997:46), for example, spill the beans. However ‘idioms are by no means as

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fixed as conventional accounts suggest’ (1997:47). Idioms will be returned to later in the

chapter.

4. Fixed phrases: MWIs that fall outside the previous categories. Grammatical and

discourse items e.g. of course, at least, by far can be included here. Also similes: white as

a sheet and greetings - how do you do. Many are strongly institutionalised, have a high

frequency and are strongly fixed (1997:47).

5. Prefabs:

Prefabs are preconstructed phrases, phraseological chunks, stereotyped collocations, or semi-fixed strings which are tied to discoursal functions and which form structuring devices. (Moon 1997:47)

Moon shows here the confusion in terminology in that these ‘prefabs’ were called

‘sentence stems’ by Pawley & Syder (1983) and lexical phrases by Nattinger &

DeCarrico (1992) ‘although they use this as a superordinate term to encompass other

kinds of multi-word item’ (1997:47). Inevitably, therefore, there are overlaps between

the categories.

Williams: It was noted previously that Nattinger & DeCarrico took a pragmatic approach

to the study of MWIs and were thus presenting a Ôfunctional modelÕ (Moon 1997) to

their study. Williams (1998) also takes a pragmatic stance in terms of prefabricated

language. Her study of negotiating language from a 117,000 word corpus of 24 simulated

case study negotiations utilised three categories of prefabricated chunks, which were then

matched to ten ‘golden rules’ of negotiating. Her pragmatic stance also extended to her

main focus - that of getting her research results into the classroom. Williams’ three

categories of prefabricated language were functional stems, purely lexical chunks and

semi-lexical chunks. These are defined below:

1. Functional stems: These are ‘recognisable components of what are presented as

functional exponents in published materialsÕ (1998:48). Examples would be I donÕt

think and Can I just with a subject and would have to, don’t want to without a subject.

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2. Purely lexical chunks: These are described as ‘fully lexical items which are of little

interest because they are linked to a specific context’ (1998:51), e.g. the new system,

though Williams says two types are of interest:

a. Chunks used for commenting on the negotiation: we can come to

b. Chunks with pragmatic meaning: at the moment/at this moment

3. Semi-lexical chunks: Williams notes that ‘the traditional division of lexis into content

and function words is over-simplistic. Many lexical items are delexicalised or semi-

lexical and find their reference and meaning in their context’ (1998:54), e.g. in terms of,

on the basis, on the basis of. Many are used with pragmatic function. e.g. one of the is

multi-functional.

4.7.5 Discussion

The above descriptions of MWIs and their various definitions lead to unavoidable

confusion. This confusion can be neither good for researchers nor students. Williams

(1998) noted quite succinctly that ‘there is little agreement on the categories used;

moreover, many of the distinctions, particularly those relating to form, seem rather

subtle’ (Williams 1998:24). The categories can be seen to be perhaps too many (Moon,

Nattinger) or too few (Weinert). The table below gives a brief outline of some of the key

definitions of MWIs noted in this review.

TABLE V: SUMMARY OF CATEGORIES OF MULTI-WORD ITEMS

Writer Categories of Multi-Word ItemsPrendergast 1864 Chunks and idiomatic sentences taken in and then

used by childrenPalmer 1917 Polylogs: collocations and longer fixed phrasesKeller 1979 Gambits: Phrases that ‘serve to introduce what a

speaker is about to say’ (1979:220). Gambits have four main functions as: 1. semantic introducers; 2. signalling social context; 3. signalling a speakers state of consciousness; and 4. communication control function.

Nattinger 1980 1. Polywords: short fixed phrases, the meanings of which are often not analysable by the regular rules of

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syntax. Can substitute for single words e.g. kick the bucket, powder room, put up with. Euphemisms, slang, 2-3 part verbs and idioms. 2. Phrasal constraints: short, relatively fixed phrases with slots that permit some variation. 3. Deictic locutions: short to medium length phrases of low variability to monitor conversation - as far as I know, if I were you etc. 4. Sentence builders: phrases of up to sentence length - highly variable containing slots - not only X but y. 5. Situational utterances: usually complete sentences e.g. IÕll see you next week. The appropriate thing to say in certain circumstances. 6. Verbatim texts: numbers, alphabet, days of week, aphorisms, proverbs etc.

Yorio 1980 Idioms and routines formulas. Routine formulas defined by: 1. Situation formulas - associated with a specific situation - this hurts me more than it hurts you. 2. Stylistic formulas - used when a certain register or style is used. 3. Ceremonial formulas. 4. Gambits -as in Keller above. 5. Euphemisms - avoidance formulas

Pawley & Syder 1983 Lexicalized sentence stemsAlexander 1984 Five categories: 1. idioms 2. discourse-structuring

devices 3. proverbs 4. catchphrases 5. quotations/allusions

Cowie 1988 Two major groups: 1. Pragmatically specialized: good morning, how are you2. Semantically specialized/idiomatic: kick oneÕs heels, pass the buck

Nattinger 1988 As Nattinger 1980Kjellmer 1991 Set Expressions: fossilized, semi-fossilized and

variable phrases.Nattinger & DeCarrico 1992 polywords, institutionalised phrases, phrasal constraints,

sentence buildersLewis 1993 1. Polywords: short, 2 or 3 words ranging from opaque

to totally transparent meaning. 2. Collocations: fixed collocations are one kind of polyword. They are non-reciprocal. Collocations are not pragmatically tied and so differ from institutionalised phrases. Words and collocations are more interested with the content of what the language user expresses rather than what the language user is doing (1993:94).3. Instutionalised expressions: pragmatic in character - ensure efficient processing in speech and writing:short utterances: Not yet, certainly not sentence heads or frames: Sorry to interrupt, but can I just say .... full sentences: readily identifiable pragmatic meaning

Weinert 1995 Formulaic languageFernando 1996 Ideational, interpersonal and relational expressionsMoon 1997 Multi-word items:

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compounds, phrasal verbs, idioms, fixed phrases, prefabs

Howarth 1998 Word combinations: functional expressions (idiomatic and non-idiomatic) / composite units (grammatical & lexical composites)

Williams 1998 Prefabricated chunks: functional stems, purely lexical chunks, semi-lexical chunks

The confusion of terminology generated in the literature is further exemplified in the

table below, where the same lexical phenomena are referred to by different researchers

using different terminology:

TABLE VI: DIFFERENT TERMINOLOGY USED FOR SAME MWI PHENOMENA

What one calls ... The other calls ....Keller: semantic framing gambits >> Nattinger - deictic locutionsKeller: subject expansion semantic >>framing gambits

Nattinger & DeCarrico:sentence builders

Lewis: institutionalised phrases >> Nattinger & DeCarrico: phrasal constraints/sentence builders

Moon: fixed phrases >> Nattinger & DeCarrico: institutionalised phrases

The studies can be criticised for other reasons, too. With the exception of Moon (1997)

and Williams (1998) all of this work is based on intuition and introspection. Keller

(1979) did use a corpus but this was a) rather small - only 131,536 words b) from a very

limited area - boardroom and media discussions and c) the final sorting of gambits for

inclusion was not based on frequency but on native speaker intuition of a panel of three

ÔjudgesÕ. The use of intuition is also very clear in the diverse terminology used.

However, despite the conflicting terminology, analysis of this category of language

forms an important part this thesis, and thus it is useful that the central features of MWIs

are pulled out of the chaos of terminology and given more systematic treatment.

4.7.6 Characteristics of MWIs: making sense of the definitions

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The following section will look at the underlying characteristics of the definitions

presented in the previous section. In doing this three separate dichotomies will be used to

discuss the methodological implications of adopting this view of language:

· the fixedness and non-fixedness of lexical categories

· the relation of form to function

· competence and performance - is this dichotomy needed, and where does lexical

methodology stand in this debate?

Following on from this, the implications of these discussions for teachers and language

learners will be discussed in reference to the lexical approach (Lewis 1993, 1997). An

explanation of why knowledge of pre-fabricated language is important and, therefore,

why it is important to include MWIs in this study will then be presented, leading to a

definition of how prefabricated language is investigated in this thesis.

4.7.6.1 Fixed and non-fixed: points on a continuum

It has been seen throughout this thesis that certain aspects of language can be viewed as

forming continua. In the last chapter it was seen that Business English language could be

considered to be layered, going from transparent to opaque meanings. It was also seen

earlier in this chapter that collocations go from the unique and totally fixed, to free

combinations of words. The same phenomenon has also been pointed out by several

writers with regard to multi-word units. The concept of continua, therefore, affects not

only words, but also classes95 of words and strings of words that go to form the MWIs.

Pawley & Syder (1983) constantly stressed the fact that their categories should not be

seen as independent units but that ‘in seeking discrete classes we are in danger of

misrepresenting the nature of the native speakers’ knowledge’ (1983:212). Nattinger &

DeCarrico, after reviewing different kinds of MWIs, noted that many linguists had

previously seen idioms and other Ôfrozen formsÕ (1992:34) as separate from

95 See also McCarthy (1990:7-8) on the gradability of idioms.

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mainstream language, considering them as part of less creative language. They, however,

take a different approach. They say that ‘it is more likely that what constitutes a pattern

and what does not is relative, a matter of degree instead of kind, for one usually finds a

continuum in the amount of variation involved, from more invariable and frozen forms

(such as idioms and clichŽs) to less invariable (non-canonical) forms’ (1992:34).

Howarth (1998) also sees what he calls Ôformulaic languageÕ as being on a continuum,

shown in Table VII below. Categorisation of the phrases is possible by creating a

continuum ‘derived from the application of such criteria as restricted collocability,

semantic specialization, and idiomacity, each of which is gradable’ (Howarth 1998:28).

TABLE VII: FORMULAIC LANGUAGE AS DEFINED BY HOWARTH (1998)

free combinations

restricted collocations

figurative idioms pure idioms

lexical compositesverb + noun

blow a trumpet blow a fuse blow your own trumpet

blow the gaff

grammatical compositespreposition + noun

under the table under attack under the microscope

under the weather

(Howarth 1998:28)

This gradability is represented in the table above. Howarth places ‘pure’ idioms at one

end of the scale, sharing a similar view of them to Nattinger & DeCarrico: that of

fixedness.

However, this traditional view of idioms is challenged by Moon (1997). She initially

gives a quite traditional definition of idioms, saying that they are:

... multi-word items that are not the sum of their parts: they have holistic meanings which cannot be retrieved from the individual meanings of the component words. (Moon 1997:46)

Examples of these idiomatic MWIs would be kick the bucket and rain cats and dogs.

She then goes on to issue a warning (noted earlier) by saying that ‘idioms are by no

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means as fixed as conventional accounts suggest’ (1997:47). Using the COBUILD corpus

to analyse occurrences of idioms and fixed phrases in English she found that of the

occurrences of idioms, forty per cent ‘regularly varied and were unstable in form’

(1997:52). She gives the example of not touch something with a bargepole and shows

how considerable variation is allowed. She then says that

...it might be better to have a notion of ‘preference of form’ or ‘preferred lexical realisation’ rather than ‘fixedness of form’, and better to build on the fact that there is a complex relationship between deep semantics and surface lexis, rather than it all being a simple case of individual anomalous strings with non-compositional meanings.

(Moon 1997:53)

This is also pure ÔSinclarianÕ thinking. As early as 1991 Sinclair had stated

One is struck first by the fixity and regularity of phrases, then by their flexibility and variability, then by the characteristically creative extensions and adaptations which occur, sometimes more than the ‘ordinary’ form. (Sinclair 1991:104)

Williams (1998), after Fernando (1996), also sees the variability of these phrases and

places MWIs on two further continua. She notes that

... prefabricated chunks straddle the lexis/grammar divide and that two fundamental continua are involved:

ideational chunks --->----->---->------chunks with pragmatic meaning

fixed expressions ----->----->----->--- semi-fixed expressions(Williams 1998:24-25)

Thus MWIs can be placed along a series of continua:

fixed >>>>>>>>>>>>> non-fixedcontinuous >>>>>>>>>>>>> discontinuouscompositional >>>>>>>>>>>>> non-compositional ideational >>>>>>>>>>>>> pragmatic

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The last of these continua - ideational to pragmatic meaning - will be returned to when

discussing the competence/performance question. Before doing that, however, another

point raised by Williams (1998) should be addressed - that of the relationship between

linguistic form and function.

4.7.6.2 The relationship of form and function

It was another Williams, Marion, in 1988 who pointed out the lack of correlation

between the language used in meetings and the language used to teach them in Business

English books of the time. The materials she studied worked on the assumption that there

is a one-to-one relationship between a linguistic form or expression and the function to

which it would be used. Williams was also quick to criticise teaching materials as using

examples of functional exponents that were too long and overly polite.96 This criticism

was taken up by Anne Williams (1998). Anne Williams noted the contradiction whereby

the old functional approach has been somewhat discredited by these criticisms, but at the

same time, the Ôlexical approachÕ that advocates very similar large-ish chunks of

language for language learners is very much in vogue. Criticism is thus focused on how

far there can be seen to be a relationship between linguistic form and language function.

The literature shows diversity of thought on this matter. Keller (1979) seemingly placed

form and function as compatible, as his taxonomies represent a one-to-one relationship

between a gambit and its pragmatic usage. Cowie (1988) criticises this in KellerÕs work,

saying that many of the gambits ‘lack the fixity of form which is a precondition of

complete specialization in a given discourse function’ (Cowie 1988:133). Pragmatic

specialisation for Cowie is one of degree, but he does stress the large amount of language

that is totally fixed.

Williams (1998) largely rejects the link between form and function, at least as it was seen

in the traditional sense in language teaching materials. She prefers to link a variety of

96 See Chapter 3, Section 3.8.5 for a fuller discussion on this.

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language chunks to ten Ôgolden rules of negotiatingÕ rather than tie them to individual

functions,97 as she found, especially with the shorter chunks that

... not only were they used at various stages of the negotiation to express a variety of functions; a number of chunks can be linked tomore than one of the golden rules. (Williams 1998:78)

Williams does note that there are some cases of a one-to-one relationship especially

within her class of ‘functional stems’ (she gives the example of Could you repeat that ?

and asking for repetition). She finds in this category and in her other two, (‘purely lexical

chunks’ and ‘semi-lexical chunks’) that chunks are far more likely to perform a variety

of roles and thus be multi-functional.

In taking this view Williams is somewhat at odds with Nattinger & DeCarrico (1992).

Their view of lexical phrases was that they are Ôform/function compositesÕ, i.e. the

phrases perform certain pragmatic functions within the language. They see lexical

phrases as having three main kinds of ‘function’: social interactions,98 necessary topics

and discourse devices. These three functions are then used as umbrella terms under which

the three formal categories (polywords, phrasal constraints and sentence builders) are

used to further categorise the lexical phrases. However, although they lean heavily

towards the view that form and function can be joined, they also admit that ‘the pairing

of form and function remains to some extent arbitrary’ (1992:54). Henry (1996) concurs

with Nattinger & DeCarrico, but also suggests that ‘there is likely to be a very close link

between certain phrases and certain ÔgenresÕ’ (1996:297). Henry gives the example of

the relationship of banking transactions and the phrase how would you like the cash? It is

indeed hard to imagine another typical situation where this phrase would typically occur.

There thus seems to be a range of thinking in the literature on the form/function debate,

from that which places certain phrases firmly within a given context or pragmatic

purpose, and a view that phrases and chunks are multi-functional/situational. The view

taken in this thesis incorporates both ends of the spectrum. The evidence of Williams

(1998) cannot be refuted and it is thus taken as fact that many chunks of language, 97 Williams, in a personal communication (1999), was at pains to point out that although she has done this, she is not suggesting a link between functions and Ôunderlying positive behavioursÕ. 98 These are very similar to what Keller identified as gambits.

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especially shorter chunks, are indeed multi-functional. However, it is also held to be true

that certain blocks of language are tied to a given genre as presented by Henry above,

and consequently perform only one or a limited number of linguistic/pragmatic

functions. It may be speculated at this point that shorter chunks tend to be multi-

functional and longer ones tend to be genre- or function-specific. These points are

returned to in Chapter 9.

4.7.6.3 Competence, performance, the idiom principle and multi-word items

It was noted above by Fernando (1996) and Williams (1998) that chunks of language

range on a scale from pragmatic to ideational meaning. The ability to use this kind of

language, that is, the ability to appropriately choose the correct chunk for the correct

pragmatic situation has also given rise to some discussion in the literature. The debate

has centred around a definition of what kind of competence is needed in these situations,

and how this competence can be related to the traditional Chomskyan competence/

performance divide. Latterly, it has led to a complete rejection of Chomsky’s ideas by

some writers.

In an influential article in 1989, Widdowson discussed the differences between

Chomsky’s ideas and Hymes’ (1972) definition of communicative competence. He

concluded that ‘for Hymes linguistics is about language and for Chomsky it is not’

(Widdowson 1989:129). He continued ‘For Chomsky, then, competence is grammatical

knowledge as a deep-seated mental state below the level of language...For Hymes, on the

other hand, competence is the ability to do something: to use language’ (1989:129).

Hymes, therefore, believes knowledge of a language is not enough: there also has to be

the ability to use it. Widdowson then presents a lexical view of language by saying that

‘there is a great deal that the native speaker knows of his language which takes the form

less of analysed grammatical rules than adaptable lexical chunks’ (1989:132). If this

lexical approach is adopted then

... communicative competence is not a matter of knowing rules for the composition of sentences and being able to employ such rules to

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assemble expressions from scratch as and when occasion requires. It is much more of knowing a stock of partially pre-assembled patterns, formulaic frameworks, and a kit of rules, so to speak, and being able to apply the rules to make whatever adjustments are necessary according to contextual demands. (Widdowson 1989:135)

Nattinger & DeCarrico see this kind of competence as what they call ‘pragmatic

competence’. They do not reject Chomsky’s divisions and see them as still ‘valid’

(1992:7). However, they add pragmatic competence to the picture. This pragmatic

competence, though, they see as separate from traditional views of competence and place

it somewhere on a line from ‘strict grammatical competence on the one hand, and

performance factors such as processing, memory limitations, false starts etc. on the other’

(1992:8).

A much firmer stance against Chomsky, however, is taken by other writers. Sinclair, in

putting forward the idiom principle discussed in the previous section, completely rejects

the competence/performance distinction. He argues that the distinctions made by

Chomsky and Saussure before him were theoretical abstractions that helped organise the

seeming chaos of language. However, with the advent of the computer they are

unnecessary as the ‘chaos’ of language can be ordered by evaluating typical instances and

selecting the most typical (Sinclair 1991:103). There has thus been a shift in emphasis

from hypothetical language to real data (Lewis 1993:12).99

It can be seen therefore that the latest thinking tends to reject Chomsky’s ideas and points

the way to a new kind of ‘competence’ - that of being able to know, understand and

marshal the use of prefabricated blocks of language to generate fluent discourse. This has

been the starting point of the Lexical Approach to language teaching, which has

suggested that former teaching practices need to be re-thought and old grammar-based

syllabuses need to be replaced by ones that place lexis at the forefront. The next section

will look at this approach and why it is so important for language learning. This will also

provide a justification for including the study of prefabricated language in this thesis.

99 Lewis also noted that, by definition, the Chomskyan concept of competence could not be empirically investigated and is thus invalid (1993:12).

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4.8 The Lexical Approach

The work of Nattinger & DeCarrico (1992) has played a part in the wider movement

popularising a lexical approach towards language teaching, but their work has been

criticised for not going far enough. Henry (1996) criticised them on four counts:

1. Learners are only presented with chunks - they do not discover them themselves.

2. Phrases are learned but how can teachers create situations in which to practise them?

3. It is difficult for teachers to ensure students remember the right slot-fillers.

4. Not enough attention is paid to aspects of speech: tone, rhythm, timing etc.

It was primarily to address some of these issues that Willis (1990), Lewis (1993, 1997,

2000) and others (Hill 1999, Morgan Lewis, Hill, Conzett, Woolard 2000) have

advocated a lexical approach to language and language teaching. Lewis retrospectively

defined the lexical approach in 1997 as follows:

... the Lexical Approach places communication of meaning at the heart of language and language learning. This leads to an emphasis on the main carrier of meaning, vocabulary. The concept of a large vocabulary is extended from words to lexis, but the essential idea is that fluency is based on the acquisition of a large store of fixed and semi-fixed pre-fabricated items, which are available as the foundation for any linguistic novelty or creativity. (Lewis 1997:15)

Lewis’s writings are broadly based and draw as much on philosophy as they do on

linguistic literature. However, it is possible to summarise the lexical approach using the

following four points:

· language rests on a series of continua

· language consists of grammaticalised lexis, not lexicalised grammar

· collocations are central to language production and should be more actively taught

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· ‘used language’ language should be stressed: probable language rather than possible

language.

Each of these four areas will now be looked at briefly in turn.

a) Language rests on a series of continua

Lewis believes that concepts of language should not be polarised and presented as

separate independent units. Instead their constituent parts should be seen as points on

series of continua. These continua he calls ‘spectra’ (1993:37) and he presents seven

spectra in order to put his views forward. Lewis thus concurs with the discussion held

previously on the fluid nature of language and the range of lexical items from the fixed to

the non-fixed (Pawley & Syder 1983, Nattinger & DeCarrico 1992, Howarth 1998).

1. Spectrum of generative power: Lewis believes in the generative power of some words

as opposed to the structuralist view that it is grammar that generates meaning, and that

words are fixed blocks to add onto this structure. Lexis for Lewis ranges from grammar

words that generate phrases, to unique and precise terms of vocabulary that are totally

fixed. In stressing the generative power of words, Lewis is concurring with Sinclair &

Renouf (1988) who, in an article concerning the lexical syllabus, stress the importance of

de-lexicalised verbs and their power to generate a multitude of meanings in combination

with other words.100

2. Spectrum of generalisability: Language teaching has largely presented language in

terms of fixed grammatical rules which may have exceptions. Lewis suggests that rather

than think of rules and exceptions we should think of the generalisability of the

statements about language. Thus, students should be informed that certain items are

fixed, but most are on a sliding scale of generalisability.

3. Spectrum of communicative power: Not all words are equally useful - verbs must play

a central role, but in a lexical rather than in a grammatical role. Lewis notes that

‘Language teachers, usually accidentally, see vocabulary largely in terms of nouns, and

100 Note here also Lewis’s stress on verbs in the spectra of communicative power.

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the teaching of verbs has largely been confined to work on their structure (Lewis

1993:39). Analysis of the BEC and PMC has made findings in this matter which bear out

Lewis’s views on this. Distinct differences were found between nominal and verbal usage

in real-life business and published Business English materials. These differences will be

discussed in detail in Chapter 9.

4. Spectrum of likelihood: Teachers should present language to students in terms of how

likely language is, rather than seeing it in terms of simply being correct or non-standard.

Lewis gives the example of the non-count quality of the word weather - which is usually

taught as a non-count noun. However, the phrase out in all weathers goes against this

rule so absolute statements regarding this noun, and language in general, should be

avoided.

5. Spectrum of acceptability: Lewis suggests the development for teachers of a spectrum

of acceptability of language used by students, as opposed to the simple right/wrong

method in use today. This, he realises, is a contentious issue.

6. Spectrum of conventionality: Here Lewis discusses the fact that language is arbitrary -

a dog is called a dog for no apparent reason. Therefore, language is a matter of

convention and he notes that ‘some language is much more a matter of convention than

other language (linguistic not social convention)’ (1993:41). In this he is referring to

written language which he regards as more conventionalised that spoken. Language

should thus be seen on a scale of conventionality.

7. Spectrum of categorisation: Lewis suggests we should not pre-categorise words too readily:

Pedagogically, if students learn words as belonging to a particular category, they may well not see, and be unwilling to experiment with, the kind of flexible categorisation which maximises communicative power. (Lewis 1993:42)

Thus for Lewis language, and the categories by which it can be defined, are not fixed.

This, of course, is quite different from traditional structuralist views of language, where

the definition of grammatical class was the basis for the teaching syllabus. Different too,

therefore, is his approach to grammar and lexis.

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b) Language consists of grammaticalised lexis, not lexicalised grammar

Traditionally, grammar has held pride of place in teaching syllabuses, with lexis or

vocabulary at best a poor second. The lexical approach, in contrast, puts lexis at the

forefront as an organising principle. Lewis states simply in the introduction to

Implementing the Lexical Approach that ‘language consists not of traditional grammar

and vocabulary but often of multi-word prefabricated chunks’ (1997:3). However, Lewis

is careful to add that this approach still holds grammar in high regard and recognises the

generative element of grammar without which ‘novelty and innovation - possible

language - become impossible’ (1997:14). Grammar thus facilitates language use when

speakers need to create something novel and new but it is only needed ‘when we are

unable to find what we want ready-made in our mental lexicons’ (Morgan Lewis101

2000:15). The lexical approach here echoes the idiom-open principles of Sinclair (1991).

Although Lewis’s ideas are not based on any empirical work of his own, there has been

enough work done by others noted in this chapter to fully justify his beliefs. It was noted

previously in the section of grammatical and lexical collocations that writers now believe

that lexis and grammar are fully integrated systems. Hunston & Francis (1998), for

example, indeed refer back to the work of Lewis in their article on creating a pedagogic

grammar from the COBUILD corpus. Their concept of pattern noted earlier shows that

‘lexical items have describable patterns’ (Hunston & Francis 1998:69) and that lexis and

grammar are part of an interrelated system where ‘patterns...bridge the gap between

lexicalizations and rules’ (1998:63).

c) Collocations

Collocation is central to the lexical approach. Hill (1999) goes so far as to suggest a

possible extension to Hymes’ communicative competence by saying that ‘We are

familiar with the concept of communicative competence, but perhaps we should add the

concept of collocational competence to our thinking’ (1999:5). Collocational competence

101 The full name is used here to avoid confusion with Michael Lewis (no relative).

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is, therefore, considered a key factor in the lexical approach for the learning of language.

Studies by Bahns (1993) and Bahns & Eldaw (1993) point to the problems students have

when they are unable to successfully collocate. Their views are echoed by Hill (2000)

who observes that non-native speakers have problems ‘not because of faulty grammar but

a lack of collocations’ (Hill 2000:49).

Powell (1998), Williams (1998) and Morgan Lewis (2000), additionally, all point to the

relationship of knowledge of collocation and grammaticalisation. The fewer ready-made

chunks of language a speaker has to use, the more they have to grammaticalise what they

are trying to communicate. The more students have to grammaticalise, the more chance

there is of making language mistakes.102

d) ‘Used language’

The lexical approach stresses the importance of input and this input should be language

that is ‘used’103 in the terms of David Brazil (1995). This means it should be probable

language and not just possible language. Language input should be authentic - or at least

close to authentic, and teaching materials should get away from the ‘la plume de ma

tante’-type hypothetical sentences so popular within the structuralist approach. It is

thought within the lexical approach that ‘Good quality input should lead to good quality

retrieval. Impoverished input will lead to impoverished retrieval’ (Hill 2000:54).

The discussion here on the pedagogical implications of adopting a lexical approach to

language teaching will be continued in Chapter 9, where the pedagogical implications of

this research are discussed, especially in relation to materials development. Now though,

the manner in which MWIs are studied in this research needs to be presented.

102 Morgan Lewis (2000:16) gives the example of the phrase major turning point. He writes that if a student does not know this phrase they would have to paraphrase, e.g. a very important moment when things changed completely, with the increased likelihood of mistakes.103 Brazil defines used language as ‘language which has occurred under circumstances in which the speaker was known to be doing something more than demonstrate the way the system works’ (Brazil 1995:24).

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4.9 Multi-word items in this thesis

The previous sections have shown that it is difficult to use even superordinate terms to

cover the concept of multi-word items, as so many terms have been used over the years

by different researchers. What cannot be in any doubt, however, is their centrality in

language use and reception, and consequently their importance to learners of English as a

second language. The vast store of lexical chunks and collocations stored in the mental

lexicon enables quick retrieval and both speeds and eases communication. This

knowledge is shared between native speakers who can recognise the chunks used by each

other, thus aiding both production and reception of language. It can also be argued that

knowledge of chunks typical to a given genre or discourse community enables the

interlocutors to process language in a similar way - each sharing the knowledge of the

field. It has already been seen in the previous chapter that this is the case at the level of

single words. It only seems logical to assume that the same can be said of multi-word

items.

For these reasons it is important to include MWIs in any study of business language.

Additionally, as one aim of this research is that the results of this thesis be utilised in the

classroom, it is important to take into account the methodology presented by Lewis

(1993,1997). This thesis studies MWIs in the following ways:

1. It computes the most frequent multi-word items in the BEC going from two words up

to eight word chunks.

2. It also computes the most key multi-word items - that is, those MWIs that occur

unusually frequently in the BEC using the BNC corpus of general English as a reference

point.

3. MWIs are analysed in terms of their semantic prosody.

4. MWIs are analysed in terms of their colligational patterning.

5. When analysing MWIs, account is taken of Business English language as a whole and

the individual macro-genres that go to make it up.

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6. The length, frequency and functionality of the MWIs is considered - thus referring to

the work of Williams (1998), who noted that shorter MWIs are more frequent in the

language and perform a greater variety of functions than longer ones.

7. The genre-specificity of MWIs (Henry 1996) is also considered and discussed.

8. The study focuses only on continuous MWIs.

9. No account is taken of compositionality or grammatical well-formedness (Moon

1997).

10. Finally, a selection of MWIs are analysed in terms of the knowing-acting axis of

Pickett (1988) discussed in Chapter 3. Thus, sample MWIs are categorised in terms of

whether they are used more for talking about business - knowing - or for doing business -

acting. Additionally, these same MWIs are categorised along a written-spoken axis,

indicating which are more used in written or spoken macro-genres.

4.10 The next chapter

If it can be said that Business English and lexis are the what of this work (they represent

what is studied in this thesis), then the use of corpora and corpus linguistic methodology

represent the how: corpora provide the means by which the research is carried out. The

next chapter will, therefore, give a reasoning and justification for the use of corpora in

this research. In doing this, a general methodological background will be provided that

places this thesis within the bounds of British traditions of text analysis.

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Chapter 5 The Methodological Background:British Traditions of Text Analysis,Correlative Register Analysis andCorpus Linguistics

5.1 Introduction

In looking at both Business English and lexis in the previous chapters, the

methodological base on which this research stands has been referred to, but so far has not

been fully laid out. One problem with a work of this nature is that it does not fit neatly

into one area - in examining Business English the fields of corpus linguistics, lexis,

collocation, colligation, multi-word items, and studies into register, discourse and genre

analysis are all touched upon. Yet despite the apparent diversity of the areas of study in

this thesis, certain underlying methodological principles are at work throughout. This

thesis is firmly embedded in British traditions of text analysis as set out by Stubbs

(1993,1996),104 following along the lines of J.R. Firth, M.A.K. Halliday and John

Sinclair in particular. This chapter, consequently, is divided into two parts.

· Firstly, this chapter will look at how this thesis is placed in the context of British text

linguistics following the main principles laid out by Stubbs (1993, 1996). Stubbs

suggested nine main principles of the British tradition of text analysis, of which eight

will be utilised here. In each case StubbsÕ principles will be briefly elucidated,

followed by an explanation of how this thesis relates to it.

· Secondly, by linking this thesis to principles of British text analysis in the tradition of

Firth and especially Sinclair, a further important link is forged: that of the necessity of

using corpus-based methodology in order to investigate language. This chapter will

also, therefore, lay out the methodological reasoning behind the choice of the use of

corpora. This will lead to the next chapter, where the two corpora created for this

104 Stubbs’ work has been published twice, originally in 1993 and then in an extended format in Stubbs (1996). In this section the references given are from both versions.

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study - the Business English Corpus and the Published Materials Corpus - will be

presented, in relation to key issues of corpus creation.

5.2 British traditions in text analysis: Firth, Halliday and Sinclair

The article by Stubbs, on which this part of the chapter is based, mostly covers British

traditions in text analysis from Firth onwards. While there are references to the early

work of Firth in the 1930s, StubbsÕ main focus is a contrast between the work of British

linguists in the tradition of Firth, to the conceptualisation of language as put forward by

Chomsky. Although Halliday and Sinclair were working within the same time frame as

that of Chomsky - 1960s to the 1990s - they represent a very different view of language

and language research and these differences are now discussed in reference to the nine

points made by Stubbs.

5.2.1 Principle 1: Linguistics is essentially a social science and an applied science

The first difference between the Chomskyan and British schools of thought discussed by

Stubbs is related to views on linguistics itself. Chomsky saw linguistics as a branch of

cognitive psychology, whereas Firth, Halliday and Sinclair saw it as an applied social

science (Stubbs 1993:3). Thus for the British school, linguistics should be seen in a social

context, and although this view holds that ‘social scientific study need not have any

practical applications’ (Stubbs 1993:4), in practice, much of the British work has had an

applied element. Stubbs notes that ‘Firth describes his work as essentially sociological’

(1993:4) and the work of Sinclair - notably the COBUILD project - has led to

pedagogical grammars, dictionaries and teaching materials. Stubbs notes that Halliday, in

his work on register, has also formed a basically socially-based definition of it. Language

study, then, in effect, should be related to applied issues and not be seen as ‘work

divorced from all social relevance’ (1993:4).

The view taken in this thesis is that research should have a direct applied element and the

results of the research should be able to be utilised directly in the classroom. The focus in

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this research on the key lexical items of Business English aims at creating a core lexis of

Business English that can serve as a bank of information for both teachers and students

alike. This information is stored electronically which, additionally, facilitates easy access

and retrieval. As a result of this easy access, an easier transfer of data to teaching

materials can also be achieved. The use of semantic prosody as an organising element for

collocations and multi-word items adds a further educational element to the study - a

framework is provided for students by which the complexities of collocation can be

organised. Examples of teaching materials already created from the corpus can be found

in Appendix 11 in Vol. II, p.891.

5.2.2 Principle 2: Language should be studied in actual, attested, authentic

instances of use, not as intuitive, invented, isolated sentences

It is clear from this second principle that it is an attack on the Chomskyan rationalist

view of language, where the focus of study was Ôintuitive, invented, isolated

sentencesÕ. Thus for Chomsky, isolated invented sentences were studied and advanced

as credible data to put forward his theories of language. These sentences were created by

the researcher and did not come from any actual objective data. The Firthian tradition

takes an opposing view. For Firth, language could not be studied as isolated sentences

and was seen as contextual. He noted in 1957 that ‘The text is the focus of attention ... is

regarded as an integral part of the context, and is observed in relation to the other parts

regarded as relevant in the statement of the context’ (Firth 1957:175-176). He continued,

‘The placing of a text as a constituent in a context of situation contributes to the

statement of meaning since situations are set up to recognize use’ (1957:179). Thus, for

Firth, language derives its meaning from context and cannot be seen out of it.

Consequently, as language is contextual, according to this view ChomskyÕs methods are

invalidated.

The use of introspection and intuitive data - a key factor in Chomsky’s approach to

linguistics - is strongly criticised by Stubbs: ‘One does not expect a scientist to make up

the data at the same time as the theory, or even to make up the data afterwards, in order

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to illustrate the theory’ (Stubbs 1996:29). StubbsÕ views are echoed by Sinclair: ‘human

intuition about language is highly specific, and not at all a good guide to what actually

happens when the same people actually use the language’ (Sinclair 1991:4). More

bitingly, perhaps, he commented that ‘One does not study all of botany by making

artificial flowers’ (1991:6).

If intuitive data is invalid, data must, therefore, come from an outside source. This

outside source, Stubbs suggests, should be a large corpus of language: ‘A large corpus,

consisting of at least several million words, searched with computer assistance, provides

a way out of this dilemma’ (Stubbs 1996:32).

This thesis adopts the views of Sinclair and Stubbs on the use of authentic data over

intuitive and introspective. The two corpora created for this study, though not large,105

provide all the data for analysis - no data is of an introspective nature. Intuition has been

used only where categorisation of language is necessary and empirical methods are not

available.

5.2.3 Principle 3: The unit of study must be whole texts

In terms of corpus creation there have been two basic methods for determining corpus

content. The first is to take, for example, 2,000-5,000 word extracts from a variety of

pre-determined texts to hopefully provide a ÔbalancedÕ sample. The second is to use

whole texts. Early corpora of limited size used the former method, but with the rise of

larger corpora the focus has been more on using full texts. Choice of full texts also has a

significant impact on the kind of data that can be studied. Stubbs notes that ‘few

linguistic features of a text are distributed evenly throughout’ (1996:32) with the result

that the use of only a small ÔsampleÕ of given text will inevitably miss out a great many

features present. This is especially important when studying genre. Studies into genre

have noted how certain linguistic features are typical of certain parts of a text and an

105 Stubbs is probably referring here to a corpus size that could say something about the whole language. In this research only Business English is under analysis and the corpus size is considered adequate. See Chapter 6, Section 6.2.1 for more discussion on corpus size.

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approach to corpus creation that only takes extracts at random will fail to gain a

representative sample in this respect:

... a corpus which does not reflect the size and shape of the documents from which it is drawn is in danger of being seen as a collection of fragments where only small-scale patterns are accessible.

(Sinclair 1991:19)

The idea of using the category of whole text as the starting point for analysis of language

as opposed to the word was discussed by Scott (1997). Scott compared this approach

with other corpus analytical methods - notably the word-and-collocation-span model

(Scott 1997:235). This latter approach starts from an analysis of a node word and centres

on the collocation of words within a pre-determined span of it. ScottÕs approach here

was essentially different. Rather than starting from a word and seeing how it behaves, the

key word statistic is determined by comparing a whole text to a reference corpus. The

software used to perform the analysis - WordSmith - computes key words that occur

significantly more often in the whole text under analysis than could be expected on the

basis of the distribution of words in the reference corpus. In this way Scott was able to

‘characterise texts, and ... develop means for drawing inferences regarding the culture

these texts spring from’ (Scott 1997:235). Tribble (1998) adopted the same method in his

genre study of Phare project proposals and notes that this full text approach ‘has

immediate and significant advantages for anyone with an interest in genres and the whole

area of language in a social context’ (Tribble 1998:5).

In line with the above discussion the BEC has been gathered entirely from full texts.106

The methods used by Scott (1997) - who analysed language in newspaper articles - are

used in this thesis to gain key words not just for a given genre, but for Business English

as a whole. The full range of lexis and the appropriate distribution of words in Business

English could not be achieved without the use of full texts. The key words then provide a

platform for more detailed analysis that takes place at the level of the word, using the

word/collocation span model for collocational analysis. It is important to stress here,

106 The one exception to this is 10,000 word extracts from 5 business books. This was unavoidable as the inclusion of whole books would have severely skewed the composition of the corpus.

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however, that this collocational analysis takes place on words that come from full texts

and not isolated samples of language, thus placing them in a full and complete lexical

environment.

5.2.4 Principle 4: Texts and text types must be studied comparatively across text

corpora

Firth believed in the heterogeneity of language, that the concepts of unity and language

are incompatible and that there is an ‘inherent variability of language’ (Stubbs 1996:33).

This variability is shown in the variety of different registers and genres of language. Both

Halliday (register analysis) and Sinclair (discourse analysis) have adapted this basic

standpoint to all their work. Stubbs notes that certain factors can hide the inherent

variance of language - the most important of which being the use of introspective data.

This point is thus in harmony with Principle 2, which noted that all data should come

from authentic attested situations and not be of the introspective kind.

In discussing the variability of language, Stubbs refers to the work of Biber (1988) (see

also for example, Biber & Finegan 1989, 1994 and Biber 1995). Biber’s work has

concentrated on linguistic variation in genres and is thus founded in earlier traditions of

statistical correlative register analysis. Biber was able to place a variety of genres on

several clines that mark out their linguistically distinguishing features in relation to six

‘text dimensions’. Biber’s work is important in that this was done according to purely

quantitative criteria.107

This study is grounded both in the tradition of Firthian British text linguistics and also in

that of correlative register analysis. It is therefore accepted that a basic definition of

language is that it varies according to register. At the same time, account is taken of

genre in terms of their organising function in the make-up of the BEC. Thus, the

assumptions of the nature of language that this thesis rests on are that a) language is

107 This contrasts markedly with the qualitative genre analysis approach as espoused by Swales (1990), which is grounded in ‘knowledge of the relevant social purposes within which the text is embedded’ (Yunick 1997:325). Yunick argues, however, that the two approaches should be seen as complementary rather than oppositional. Correlational work, as done by Biber, can identify ‘significant patterns of meaning making which might not emerge from ethnography alone’ (Yunick 1997:326).

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inherently diverse according to the purpose108 and situation it is being used in and that b)

the only way to investigate that is to gather authentic data from the situations where this

language is in actual use. The departure point for language study in this work is the two

corpora - the Business English published materials corpus (PMC) and the authentic

Business English corpus (BEC). Using these two corpora, the heterogeneity of language

is shown firstly by contrasting ‘Business English’ to ‘General English’ to study inherent

differences in lexical choice and, secondly, by a contrastive study of ‘real’ Business

English and the business language found in Business English teaching materials.

5.2.5 Principle 5: Linguistics is concerned with the study of meaning: form and

meaning are inseparable

Stubbs here quotes Chomsky (1957:17): Ôgrammar is autonomous and independent of

meaningÕ (cited in Stubbs 1996:35). This is exactly the opposite view expressed by

Sinclair (1991), where he states that ‘There is ultimately no distinction between form

and meaning’ (Sinclair 1991:7), thus expressing views held in the British tradition of text

analysis on the interdependency of form and meaning brought about by Firthian

definitions of collocation. A large part of the importance of collocational analysis in

British corpus linguistics over the last twenty years has developed from the Firthian

definition of words being at least partially defined by the other words with which they

can collocate (Firth 1951/57). There is thus a ‘syntagmatic link between words as such,

not between categories’ (Stubbs 1996:35). This thesis studies the semantic links between

words/multi-word items and the other words that surround them in a syntagmatic

relationship, and this is also related to form. The syntagmatic relationships formed are

then further categorised using the notion of semantic prosody. However, when discussing

the relationship of form and meaning, it is not possible to do it fully without reference to

the grammar/lexis divide. Stubbs’ next section deals with just this dichotomy, or, in fact,

the lack of it.

108 The word ‘purpose’ here is meant in a broad fashion to include both a Swales-type definition of communicative purpose (1990:58) as discussed in Chapter 3, and a more general social/functional purpose, i.e. language will change according to the reason and circumstances in which it is being used.

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5.2.6 Principle 6: There is no boundary between lexis and grammar: lexis and

grammar are interdependent

Traditionally grammar and lexis have been treated as separate and independent

categories. In terms of collocation, we have seen Gitsaki (1996) define three major

schools of thought: the lexical composition approach, the semantic approach and the

structural approach.109 The first two approaches, inspired by Firth, saw lexis and

grammar as separate, whilst the latter approach saw them as co-joined. Later work by

Sinclair (1991), Willis (1993) Hunston et al. (1997), Hunston & Francis (1998), Hoey

(1997, 2000) and indeed Stubbs (1993, 1996), sees lexis and grammar as dependent on

each other and interrelated. Stubbs elucidates the Principle of co-selection: lexis chooses

grammar and grammar chooses lexis: ‘What corpus study shows is that lexis and syntax

are totally interdependent. Not only different words, but different forms of a single

lemma, have different grammatical distributions’ (Stubbs 1996:38). Willis (1993)

suggests that rather than seeing grammar and lexis as separate, the starting point should

be the ‘word’110 and that the traditional concepts of grammar should be broadened to

consider the grammar of structure, necessary choice, class, collocation and probability

(Willis 1993:84-85). Later studies, it has been shown, (e.g. Hunston et al. 1997, Hunston

& Francis 1998) indeed present an even stronger case for this.111 Stubbs presents a list of

eight of the central conclusions that can be made about lexico-grammatical relationships.

Two key points are given below:

1. Any grammatical structure restricts the lexis that occurs in it; and converselyany lexical item can be specified in terms of the structures in which it occurs.(Stubbs 1996:40)

2. Every sense or meaning of a word has its own grammar: each meaning is associated with a distinct formal patterning. Form and meaning areinseparable. (Stubbs 1996:40).

109 See Chapter 4, Section 4.3.2 for a detailed explanation of this.110 Lewis (1993) criticises Willis and the COBUILD teaching materials for starting from the word as he suggests that although the COBUILD team made a breakthrough in dictionary making ‘the language teaching materials based on the same criteria were seriously inhibited by a resistance to other types of lexical item’(1993:92). 111 See Chapter 4, Section 4.3.2 for more details.

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This thesis accepts the principle of lexico-grammatical relationship as presented by

Stubbs and the later work of Sinclair. In so doing it utilises the concepts of collocation

and colligation to examine the typical lexico-grammatical formation of business lexis

and it will be seen in Chapter 9 how lexis and grammar in Business English are

intertwined.

5.2.7 Principle 7: Much language use is routine

The basic concept under discussion here is that when speaking we are not free to say

what we like, but are bounded by certain possibilities and restrictions over and above the

normally recognised grammatical categories. Each spoken or written act to a large extent

determines the next one. Thus, language is made up of a large number of lexical items

that are repeated over and over again in everyday situations in terms of individual words,

collocations and multi-word items (Peters 1983, Pawley & Syder 1983, Widdowson

1989, Sinclair 1991, Nattinger 1980, 1988, Nattinger & DeCarrico 1992, Lewis 1993,

1997). This is in contrast to Chomsky, who focused on creativity, and saw routine as

negative. This thesis concentrates on the routine language of business providing an

analysis of not only words, but also of collocates and multi-word items.

5.2.8 Principle 8: Language in use transmits the culture

Stubbs (1996) gives examples of how fixed and semi-fixed phrases are used to encode

cultural information, e.g. a soft oriental rhythm came through entrancingly / that

orientalized, barbarized nation (Stubbs 1996:169). The transmittal of culture through

language, though of interest and importance, does not form part of this thesis so no

further discussion is offered here.

5.2.9 Principle 9: Saussurian dualisms are misconceived

It is obvious from what has been written that the ideas of Firth, and later Sinclair and

Halliday were in direct opposition to Chomsky’s competence/performance dichotomy

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and by implication also de Saussure’s langue/parole distinction, i.e. that there is no need

for these distinctions at all. It has been seen that whilst not all writers reject Chomsky,

(Pawley & Syder 1983, Nattinger & DeCarrico 1992), many of those involved in corpus

linguistics, notably Sinclair, do. Stubbs notes that

The essential vision underlying corpus linguistics is that computer-assisted analysis of language gives access to data which were previously unobservable, but which can now profoundly change our understanding of language. (Stubbs 1996:45-46)

Sinclair, relying on computer-based methods, had used this fact to put forward the idiom

principle (Sinclair 1991) and a damning criticism of ChomskyÕs (1957, 1962) ideas.

Computer-assisted methodology also enabled Sinclair (1991) and Louw (1993) to

formulate the concept of semantic prosody that had hitherto been unrecognised by

rationalist approaches to language study.

This thesis is concerned with data of language in use and uses corpora in order to

investigate the language of Business English. Chomsky (1962) rejected the use of

corpora and was not interested in language as such - only idealised notions of

grammatical competence detached from real life. Therefore, the Chomskyan notion of

competence and performance is of little use in a study of this nature, and instead, the

open/idiom principle view of language put forward by Sinclair (1991) as laid out in

Chapter 4 is adopted. This methodological framework allows for a study of routine

language, it uses actual language, is firmly based on authentic situations and is stored in a

computerised format. This further facilitates an easy transfer of results to the classroom

once they have been ascertained.

A further implication of the above is that for language to be studied along the lines of

SinclairÕs idiom principle, it can only be done using computerised corpora. This thesis is

grounded in two computerised corpora and so the next section, and indeed the next

chapter, will consider issues related to corpora in general, and the creation of the two

corpora in particular.

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5.3 Corpus Linguistics

5.3.1 Corpora: a brief history

The term corpus, coming from the Latin word for ÔbodyÕ, was used as early as the 6th

century to describe a collection of legal texts, Corpus Juris Civilis (Francis 1992:17). The

term ÔcorpusÕ has retained this meaning - that of a body of text - but for corpus

linguists this definition is not enough. By one of its five OED definitions, a corpus is

‘The body of written or spoken material upon which a linguistic analysis is based’. Thus

it cannot be seen as just a collection of texts, but it further is ‘a collection of texts

assumed to be representative of a given language, dialect, or other subset of a language,

to be used for linguistic analysis’ (Francis 1982:7 cited in Francis 1992:17). Likewise,

the Collins COBUILD (1995) dictionary defines a corpus as ‘a large collection of written

or spoken texts that is used for language research’.

Francis (1992) records three main areas where corpora have historically been used.112

Corpora have been used mainly in lexicographical studies in the creation of dictionaries,

in dialectological studies and in the creation of grammars. Kennedy (1998) adds to this

work done in concordancing the Bible by Alexander Cruden in 1736.113 The image of

silver-haired professors straining over mountains of text and manually counting

occurrences of linguistic features has been a hard one to dispel.114 One early example is

mentioned by Kennedy (1992:335): the 1897 German corpus of Kaeding was created by

five thousand assistants and consisted of 11 million words. This is, of course, small by

todayÕs standards, but represented a massive achievement at the time. The use of

corpora in linguistic research was considered perfectly acceptable in the first half of this

century and the work carried out by Palmer, Thorndike and West on vocabulary noted in

112 Francis uses the term BC (before the computer) to refer to early corpora-based studies before the advent of computerisation. 113 See Kennedy (1998) Chapter 2 for a very good history of the use of corpora. 114 For a further historical account see Francis (1992) and comments in Ma (1993a). See also McEnery & Wilson (1996:2-4).

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the previous chapter, all had corpora of texts underlying their results to a greater or lesser

extent.

Yet there is a clear divide between early corpus linguists and their modern day

counterparts. The first reason for this divide is the corpus methodology used. Kennedy

(1992) notes several problems with these early corpora: they were mostly of written texts

only, just the forms were counted, not the meanings,115 and the corpora were untagged, so

homonyms were often classed as one word. The second and main reason for this divide,

however, was Chomsky. Leech (1991) notes of Chomsky that ‘His view on the

inadequacy of corpora, and the adequacy of intuition, became the orthodoxy of a

succeeding generation of theoretical linguists’ (1991:8). It has already been noted in this

thesis that in a number of articles in the late 1950s and 1960s, Chomsky challenged the

whole notion of empiricism on which corpus linguistics had been based and suggested

instead a rationalist approach.116 This approach advocated methodology where ‘rather

than try and account for language observationally, one should try to account for language

introspectively’ (McEnery & Wilson 1996:6). Chomsky attacked corpus-based studies by

saying that ‘Any natural corpus will be skewed...the corpus, if natural, will be so wildly

skewed that the description would be no more than a mere list’ (Chomsky 1962:159 cited

in Leech 1991:8). As Chomsky was more interested in competence than performance,

corpus linguistics, which was primarily based on actual performance data, seemed to be

invalidated overnight. It led to a situation that Sinclair describes:

Starved of adequate data, linguistics languished - indeed it became almost totally introverted. It became fashionable to look inwards to the mind rather than outwards to society. Intuition was the key, and the similarity of language structure to various formal models was emphasised. (Sinclair 1991:1)

Work on corpora continued despite these criticisms, however, and, with the advent of the

computer, corpora really came into their own.117 The work begun in the early sixties by 115 It should be noted, however, that Michael West’s GSL made semantic distinctions for word senses and counted the frequencies of them. 116 See StubbsÕ Principle 2 above for more on this. 117 Church & Mercer (1994) relate the rise of corpora to the resurgence of empirical methodology that had been popular in the 1950s but had gone out of fashion in the 1960s and 1970s. They suggest that empirical methods (of which corpus linguistics is one) revived due to the rise in the use of computers, the

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Randolph Quirk (the SEU Corpus), and Francis and Kucera (The Brown Corpus) was

capitalised on by Svartvik in creating the London-Lund Corpus (LLC), creating a

machine-readable corpus of spoken language for the first time.118 By the 1980s corpus

linguistics had almost found its way back into mainstream applied linguistics. Leech

(1991) distinguishes three generations of corpora going from the early one million word

corpora to the present day where corpora can be measured in the hundreds of millions of

words.119 This rise of corpus-based research can be seen in the number of corpora-related

studies carried out. Svartvik (1992:8) shows that whereas only ten corpus-based studies

could be identified before 1965, between 1986 and 1992, 320 were carried out. There is a

profound sense amongst corpus linguists these days that the use of corpora has

ÔarrivedÕ. Sinclair notes:

Thirty years ago when this research was started it was considered impossible to process texts of several million words in length. Twenty years ago it was considered marginally possible but lunatic. Ten years ago it was considered quite possible but still lunatic. Today it is very popular. (Sinclair 1991:1)

The latest trends in corpus linguistics are discussed by Flowerdew (1998), who suggests

that whereas earlier corpus studies were concerned with the exploration of linguistic

patterns, modern studies are becoming more and more concerned with the exploitation of

corpora for pedagogical purposes. She argues that more studies are needed that take into

account aspects of discourse and genre and that whilst some work in this direction has

been done (see, for example, Tribble 1998), there is still a need for more. Exploitation of

corpora now also takes into account the creation of teaching materials (see Wichmann et

al. 1997 for discussion on this), and this aspect will be covered in more detail in Chapter

9 of this thesis.

5.3.2 Why use corpora ?

increased availability of data and a greater emphasis on Ôdeliverables and evaluationÕ (Church & Mercer 1994:21-22). 118 See Svartvik (1996) for a history of work on corpora carried out at Lancaster University by Leech. 119 This latter category was only a prediction of LeechÕs, but it has now come true.

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When discussing the relationship of this thesis to traditions of British text analysis above,

it was stressed that language study must make use of ‘actual, attested, authentic instances

of use’. The thoughts of Stubbs and Sinclair were quoted at length to stress the necessity

of this line of thinking. Belief in this approach to linguistic analysis leads automatically,

therefore, to the use of corpora. The next section of this chapter, accordingly, examines

the reasons why a corpus linguistic approach has been chosen for this work. Therefore,

what follows is a brief discussion of the merits and possible pitfalls of using corpora for

linguistic study, as seen in the literature.

5.3.3 Corpora: For and against

It is possible to derive three basic standpoints from the literature with regard to the use of

corpora in linguistic analysis. These standpoints can be summarised as a) those strongly

for the use of corpora; b) those for corpora, but with certain reservations; and c) those

against their use altogether. Such did the climate change in the 1990s that the utility of

corpora for language analysis is no longer seriously questioned.120 The days of the

overwhelming influence of Chomsky have gone and the third alternative presented above

is no longer tenable. With regard to the first two of the three categories, therefore,

Murison-Bowie (1996) presents a neat definition:

The strong case suggests that without a corpus (or corpora) there is no meaningful work to be done. The weak case is that there are additional descriptive pedagogic perspectives facilitated by corpus-based work which improve our knowledge of the language and our ability to use it. (Murison-Bowie 1996:182)

Writers tending towards the stronger end of this continuum include Stubbs and Sinclair,

but even most pro-corpus writers do not follow the creed of corpus linguistics blindly.

They realise that whilst there are considerable advantages to be gained from corpora,

there are also possibly negative aspects that need to be taken into consideration. The

120 Though see Owen (1993) discussed later in this chapter.

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positive and negative aspects of corpora use, therefore, can be presented with reference to

the literature as follows.

5.3.4 Reasons for the use of corpora in linguistic analysis

The advantages of corpora use were expounded over thirty years ago by Halliday and

Sinclair, in 1966. At that time Halliday suggested the creation of a 20 million-word

corpus for collocational analysis (Halliday 1966:159) and Sinclair declared that the

problems of lexis ‘are not likely to yield to anything less imposing than a very large

computer’ (Sinclair 1966:410). This enthusiasm for corpora has already been

documented above, but other writers have presented compelling reasons for the use of

corpora. It is important to note here, however, that the use of corpora and the use of

computers to analyse them are held to be synonymous. Thus, some of the advantages

stated below for the use of corpora are actually advantages brought about by the use of

computer technology rather than those of corpora per se. This being said, at least ten

main interrelated factors can be found in the literature that confirm the advantages of

computerised corpora use in linguistic analysis:

1. Objectivity vs intuition: The notion of a researcherÕs intuition as opposed to

statistical objectivity is raised once again (as it has been many times throughout this

thesis). This point has already been discussed in Principle 2 above so does not need any

further mention here, other than to note that the objective power of language corpora is

well recognised in the literature (see Point 1 in Table VIII below) and that the advantages

brought about by computerised corpora in linguistic research are overwhelming.

2. Verifiability of results: In a related point, both Svartvik (1992) and Biber (1995)

emphasise the importance of this factor. For results to have any meaning they must be

able to be verified. Svartvik observes that verifiability is one of the main tenets of

scientific research and so it should also be of linguistics. Corpora offer the possibility of

verifying results, whereas introspection does not.

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3. Broadness of language able to be represented: This factor is widely discussed in the

literature, for example, (Svartvik 1992, Biber 1995, Biber, Conrad & Reppen 1994).

Corpus linguistic methodology facilitates the gathering of samples of different registers

and styles of language which are necessary to show the ‘wide repertoire of language’

(Svartvik 1992:9).

4. Access: Once a set of texts has been gathered and placed in a corpus it can be made

available to researchers all over the world. Moreover, it provides non-native speakers

with the same possibilities of study as native speakers. In the rationalist system, the non-

native speaker had been excluded (Svartvik 1992).

5. Broad scope of analysis: Computerised corpus analysis allows a broad battery of

statistical tests to be carried out on the data in a matter of seconds.

6. Pedagogic: There are strong pedagogic reasons (face validity, authenticity, motivation,

for example) why the results of corpora research should be used in the classroom (Johns

1988, Tribble & Jones 1990, Kennedy 1992, Wichmann et al. 1997 and Flowerdew

1998). This is an area that will be returned to in more detail in the final chapters of this

thesis.

7. Possibility of cumulative results: Biber (1995:32) notes that a corpus gives the

opportunity to several researchers to work on the same texts. In this way previous work

can be verified and the findings of the studies can be compared in a meaningful way.

8. Accountability: The possibility of verification of results leads to the accountability of

the researchers. Thus, as in other areas of science, it is possible to replicate work done

and hold the results up for comparison.

9. Reliability: The simple fact is that computers are much more reliable analysts of texts

than humans. As Biber (1995) says ‘computers do not become bored or tired’ (1995:32).

Additionally, the hard empirical evidence presented by a corpus of authentic texts can

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present indisputable evidence, for example of the frequency of particular items, that

introspection is not able to do. This view of research is neatly summed up by Francis &

Sinclair when they say that ‘Corpus data provides us with incontrovertible evidence

about how people use language’ (Francis & Sinclair 1994:191).

10. View of all language: The combination of computers and corpora allow a new view

of language.121 As Sinclair says ‘Language looks rather different when you look at a lot

of it at once’ (1991:100). Additionally, hitherto unrecognised features of the language

can become readily apparent when placed in a large corpus and analysed by computers.

Sinclair’s (1991) and Louw’s (1993) discussion on the notion of semantic prosody is a

very good case in point where the whole concept was only discovered by reference to a

large amount of corpus data.

These points can be seen summarised in Table VIII below, along with the writers who

made the points in question.

It can be seen that the reasons for the use of corpora in linguistic research are manifold.

As was stated earlier, corpora are no longer derided in linguistic circles as they were

earlier, but there has still been some residual hostility towards them (Owen 1993, 1996).

There is also the danger that corpora can be seen as an end in themselves. It is important,

therefore, to remember that it is the researcher who must do the thinking, not the

machine. In addition to outright criticism, several writers who are in fact very pro-

corpora also express reservations on their use, and point to possible pitfalls that need to

be avoided. These issues will now be addressed in the next section.

TABLE VIII: REASONS FOR USING CORPORA FOR LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS

Reason Author

121 A good example of how corpora and computers can be used to discover new aspects of language is the study of lexical landscaping in business meetings (Collins & Scott 1996). In a lexical analysis of British and Portuguese meetings, Collins & Scott were able to establish a lexical ‘landscape’, showing the collocational links between key words gained from the meetings, and how these contributed to the ‘aboutness’ of the meetings by forming into ‘complex units or non-sequential topical nets’ (Collins & Scott 1996:11).

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1. Objectivity of results as opposed to subjective intuition

Sinclair (1991), Stubbs (1996), Svartvik (1992), Biber (1995), Biber, Conrad & Reppen (1994)

2. Verifiability of results Svartvik (1992), Biber (1995)3. Broadness of language able to be represented Svartvik (1992), Biber (1995), Biber, Conrad &

Reppen (1994)4. Access Svartvik (1992)5. Broad scope of analysis offered by computerised corpora

Biber (1995), Biber, Conrad & Reppen (1994).

6. Pedagogic Johns (1988), Tribble & Jones (1990), Kennedy (1992), Wichmann et al. (eds) (1997), Flowerdew (1998)

7. Possibility of cumulative results Biber (1995)8. Accountability Biber (1995)9. Reliability Biber (1995)10. View of ‘all’ language and new perspectives Sinclair (1991), Louw (1993)

5.3.5 Some problems with the use of corpora for linguistic analysis

In the literature there can be found at least four main criticisms of the use of corpora:

· The first criticism is that corpora focus only on performance-related issues and cannot

analyse those aspects of language that are more concerned with competence (Howarth

1998).

· Secondly, the pedagogical usefulness of frequency lists generated by corpora, and the

value of authentic materials for use in the classroom, has been questioned

(Widdowson 1990, Murison-Bowie 1996, Howarth 1998).

· Thirdly, it has been suggested that intuition has been done away with altogether and

there has been the cult of complete reliance on machines with the result that common

sense has been left behind (Owen 1993).

· Finally, it has been widely discussed that corpora can suffer from problems related to

their size, representativeness and balance (Renouf 1987, Sinclair 1991, Hudson 1997,

Clear 1997, Tribble 1997, Lewis 1999 - personal communication).

The first three of these points will be dealt with in this section. The last point, however,

concerning size, representativeness and balance will go to form the next chapter, where

these issues will be discussed in relation to the two corpora created for this thesis.

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a) Corpora, competence and performance: The views of Chomsky on corpora have been

noted in this thesis several times. Thus, no further mention of his views are needed at this

point. However, recently the competence/performance dichotomy has been revived in

relation to the automatic analysis of multi-word items. Howarth (1998) criticises the

automatic analysis of corpora as carried out by Sinclair by saying that ‘such automatic

analysis focuses on performance and may exclude considerations of competence’

(1998:26). What Howarth is essentially saying here is that over-concentration on the

surface forms of language readily available in computerised corpora, can hide issues of

memory usage and production that must essentially underlie them. Thus the researcher

needs to consider how multi-word items are processed. Howarth recognises the value of

computer corpora but argues that ‘phraseological significance means something more

complex and possibly less tangible than what any computer algorithm can reveal’

(1998:27).

In answer to these criticisms it has already been argued (Stubbs 1996, Sinclair 1991) that

the competence/performance divide is invalid. There is no denying that it is a lot easier to

statistically count occurrences of words than it is to say why they are there in the first

place, or why they occur in the pattern that they do. However, this is not a problem of

corpus linguistic methodology per se, but a problem facing all linguistic analysis.

Corpora give the opportunity to take advantage of the very best sources of information

which can then be utilised to perform further analysis. Thus, the latest work using

corpora, as reported by Flowerdew (1998), is in fact now delving behind the pure

‘performance’ data of Howarth and is looking at language from a discourse and genre-

based perspective (Tribble, forthcoming).

b) Frequency and pedagogy: Corpus studies have been criticised on account of their

preoccupation with frequency (Murison-Bowie 1996). When using a corpus, usually the

first and most obvious statistics available are those of frequency. However, ‘Raw

frequency figures for individual word occurrences tell one comparatively little’

(Murison-Bowie 1996:188). Frequency, therefore, does not necessarily mean

significance. Howarth concurs with this view in relation to the teaching of collocations

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by saying that ‘a notion of significance based solely on frequency risks giving

unwarranted emphasis to completely transparent collocations such as have children,

which may occur frequently ... but are quite unproblematic for processing’ (1998:26-27-

Howarth’s use of italics).

It must be held as true that raw frequency data cannot be seen as the sole criterion by

which a vocabulary item be included in teaching materials. It was seen earlier, however,

that frequency of words was long regarded as crucial in the classroom, resulting in the

vocabulary control movement in the first half of twentieth century. This kind of

information should still be considered valid today (Francis & Sinclair 1994:191).

Frequency data can be combined with other factors such as range, utility and coverage in

order to present students with the most useful language. Additionally, the concept of

delexicalised language has shown that the most frequent words, previously ignored by

structuralist grammars, are in fact key elements in the generative power of lexis. They

therefore need to be given more attention than they previously have. Frequency data is

the first, but not the last, step in determining what language students should be exposed

to. It is, however, a first step that is essential, and supersedes previous views on the value

of introspection in performing this function.122 This aspect of corpora and pedagogy will

be revisited later in this thesis.

c) Machines vs intuition: Owen (1993) disparages the creation of a grammar based on

corpus evidence. His objections are many and a discussion on the grammars created from

corpora is outside the scope of this thesis. However, he attacks certain aspects of corpus

use that are directly relevant to this study. He bases his criticisms of corpora on several

grounds123 and questions the value of computer-aided corpora in general, arguing that

‘total reliance on a corpus does not necessarily yield better observation, and that

observation, when achieved, does not automatically equate with better explanation’

(Owen 1993:168). He particularly criticises Sinclair for supposedly excluding intuition

122 The key word analysis of Business English carried out in this thesis relies in the first stages on pure frequency to compute the key words themselves. Thus, whilst pure frequency plays little part in the lexical analysis, it forms the statistical basis on which the ÔkeynessÕ of words is established. 123 Owen mentions that Firth was suspicious of computers and would not have approved of what has seemingly been done in his name (i.e. Owen is referring to Sinclair’s COBUILD work).

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altogether as a resource in linguistic study. He concludes the article by saying that over-

reliance on corpus data ‘leads to irrelevance, oversight, and misrepresentation’ (Owen

1993:185).

Sinclair’s reply (Francis & Sinclair 1994) contests Owen’s accusation that intuition had

been abandoned. He stresses that intuition was still a part of the COBUILD corpus study,

but it was an intuition based on concrete evidence and not pure introspection. Moreover,

there can be no scientific justification for preferring one researcher’s intuition on

language over a body of data gathered from a 170 million-word corpus of authentic text.

Owen has not been the only writer to caution on the over-reliance on automated data

production. Svartvik (1992) notes that despite the vast advantages of automatic data

processing, there is still in many circumstances no replacement for laborious manual

work by the researcher. He also warns that corpus data can become abstracted from their

context as end-users often only have access to texts that were originally speech and that

speech is not available to them.

A sensible approach to corpus linguistics then, should utilise everything the machine and

the corpus have to offer, but also be guided by intuition where necessary. As Svartvik

concluded ‘the best machine for grinding out general laws out of large collections of

facts remains...the human mind’ (Svartvik 1992:12).

5.3.6 Corpora use in this study

If one refers back to Murison-BowieÕs (1996) scale of attitude towards corpora use

mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, one sees that this study veers towards the

strong end of the scale. This not to say, however, that nothing about language can be said

without corpora. However, a study of this nature is essentially correlative; it first

compares Business English to general English and then the Business English of published

materials to ÔrealÕ Business English. This kind of study is not possible to do at an

intuitive level. Intuition can help in the interpretation of the results, but the primary data

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must come from authentic sources and be able to be analysed empirically. This empirical

and quantitative research is seen as necessary to act as a balance to the purely intuitive

teaching materials in Business English that were discussed in Chapter 3. The positive

aspects of a corpus-based study, it is proposed here, far outweigh any possible negative

side-effects. Yet this study is also aware of the criticisms of corpora and therefore does

not rely purely on automatically processed data. The study of semantic prosody, to be

described in Chapter 9, for example, makes use of corpus data, but can only, at this time,

be carried out manually and, to some extent, therefore, intuitively. Thus, to paraphrase

Owen (1993:185), the corpora used in this study are the servants, not the masters.

5.4 The next chapter

The previous two chapters have reviewed the key issues involved in Business English

and lexis, whilst this chapter has placed the thesis in the methodological framework of

British linguistic analysis, correlative register analysis and latterly, corpus linguistics.

The next chapter considers the last unanswered questions noted above: those concerning

the size, representativeness and balance of corpora. This is done in relation to the two

corpora created for this thesis. Other aspects of corpus creation are also investigated,

including data processing and the storage of information for later retrieval. This leads to

Chapter 7, where the research questions and precise methodology employed in this work

are laid out in full.

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