INTRODUCTION
Collocation allows speakers to “express complex ideas very simply and yet precisely” (Lewis 2000 p16), and native speech prefers collocation to complex grammatical structures. However, it is difficult for many students to acquire this knowledge without it being explicitly taught. Woolard (ETP 2005: 48) states that ‘the noun provides the most efficient focus for learning collocations’. For this reason, I chose to focus on collocations with nouns as it will have a huge value on the learners.
This essay will not focus on other lexical items such as phrasal verbs, lexical phrases, and fixed/semi-fixed expressions. I will limit my scope to those which are not also full utterances, fixed chunks and sentence frames.
ANALYSIS
Meaning/ Use
No two writers agree on the exact definition of collocation. According to McCarthy (1990) collocation is ‘a marriage contract between words and some words are more firmly married to each other than the other’ while Thornbury (2006) states that ‘if two words collocate, they frequently occur together’. I chose to agree with Hill (in Lewis 2000) that collocations are content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs) occur together predictably.
Collocations can be categorised as strong, fixed and weak (O’Dell & McCarthy, 2008: 8). In his book, Lewis (1997) describes these categories in accordance with their fixedness and restriction.
• Weak collocators: ‘words that will make a large number of other words’. For example: good may collocate with food but they also collocate with many other words:
girl ready-made good + idea Indian + food weather ...
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...r of English, this activity is one the most efficient learning strategies because it encourages independent learning (Schmitt & Schmitt 1995) and focuses students’ attention on significant details.
The time spent also gives them opportunity to reflect on information.
In my experience it requires some teacher persistence as students can be resistant to note-taking.
Conclusion
This research has convinced me of the benefits of teaching collocation and introduced me to activities I was previously unaware of. It has also highlighted to me the crucial role it plays in producing natural sounding language; I now realise collocation explains many of my students’ errors. ‘Even advanced learners often make inappropriate or unacceptable collocations’ (McCarthy, 1990:13). I will be incorporating collocations more consistently into future teaching.
these traditions. By combining these words with a hyphen, Alexie, in turn, intertwines the two to
2 Delbridge, A., Bernard, J. R. L., Blair, D., Peters, P., Butler, S., Eds., The Macquarie Dictionary, Second Ed., Macquarie: Macquarie, 1995, p. 826.
Displays developing facility in the use of language, but sometimes uses weak or inappropriate word choice
Null, L., & Suellen, A. (Eds.). (2008, March). Words that Break, Blow and Burn. English Journal, 97(4), 111-112.
"Linguistics 201: First Language Acquisition." Linguistics 201: First Language Acquisition. Western Washington University, n.d. Web. 8 Sep. 2013. .
Pragmatics Aspects: Deixis and Distance, reference and inference, conversational implicature, anaphoric and cataphoric reference, presupposition, entailment, direct and indirect speech acts and speech events, cultural context and cross cultural pragmatics, conversational analysis and background knowledge, denotation and connotation meaning, the four maxims and hedges.
In this essay I intend to investigate how differently one of the closed word classes, determiners, are approached in a series of pre and post corpus-based English grammar reference books, course books and practice books. And the theme of my investigation is how corpus affects the development of English teaching materials. The grammar reference books I intend to analyze and compare are “A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language” (ACGEL) and “Cambridge Grammar of English” (CGE). The former is an indispensable grammar reference book first published in 1985, which has been widely consulted in researches in relation to English linguistic studies, while the later offers clear explanations of both spoken and written English grammar based on authentic everyday usage.
Fromkin, Victoria, Robert Rodman, and Nina Hyams. An Introduction to Language. 8th ed. Boston: Thomson, 2007.
Co-hyponymy occurs when two or more lexical items used in a text as subordinate members of a superordinate class (Eggins, 2004). If class/sub-classes relation is between the general item and its specific items, co-hyponymy relation is between two or more specific items. To illustrate co-hyponymy, a simple example is taken from The Story of an Hour (Eggins, 2004).
Fromkin, V., Rodman, R., & Hyams, N. (2003). An introduction to language (7th ed.). Boston: Heinle.
Issue No. 1 -. 33, 32, and a. Vol. 1, No. 1 -. 1, 1973; no. 2, 1974. California State College, Sonoma, Dept. of Education. of the English language of the country. Roseman, Ellen.
According to Gibbs (1984), if an expression is promptly identified as an idiom, the linguistic processing can be
Miller, T. P, & Faigley, L. (1982). College English. National Council of teachers of English, 44(6). Retrieved from http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0010-
North, S. (2012), 'English a Linguistic Toolkit' (U214, Worlds of English), Milton Keynes, The Open University.
Regarding the first question, ordinary dictionaries, whether monolingual or bilingual, split up the meaning into individual entries. Though ordinary dictionaries explain the meaning of a word, their effect is limited when it comes to texts. Furthermore, although modern dictionaries are paying increasing attention to collocations, their effect is hampered by their providing a whole range of information about any word beside its collocations. However, recent collocations dictionaries cover a word and its appropriate collocation. In addition, grammatical information is involved in collocation dictionaries by presenting collocations in their most typical forms in context. For example, in the entry for baby, the collocation be teething reflects the fact that this verb is always used in the progressive tenses, (Oxford Collocations Dictionary, 2002: viii).