1.
On the Ground and In the Air
“…there is room for work here too on going
beyond simply statistical accounts of collocation, and trying to explain why words co-occur.”
No shit. Not ‘room’ so much vast open prairies
stretching to the horizon and beyond so your view of open space is only limited
by the curvature of the earth, for work.
* * * * *
Collocation then. Semantic Prosody. Chunks.
From my own personal point of view this has two distinct professional
implications: collocation’s power as a tool to explain language, and
collocation’s power to teach language. Obviously one bleeds into the other, but
I’m having far greater ease envisaging it’s use as the first of those.
More directly, I can see how collocation
could be a very powerful tool to explain things to my colleagues when they ask
me questions like “but why do you use strong
here and not powerful?” but can’t
quite get my head round how to take the next step and use these ideas in the
classroom. The danger for both aspects is that it becomes a catch-all excuse;
that I say “because X does/doesn’t
collocate with Y” with the same
knee-jerk reflexivity as a parent denying their child an ice-cream “because I
said so”.
Because short of running a corpus analysis
of every query you get, how else do you explain it on a case-by-case basis? Without
wishing to blow my own trumpet, I’m pretty extensively (if not particularly widely) read – certainly above average – and just by the fact I’m doing this
course have demonstrated a higher than normal interest in language and the way
it works. I’m quite confident in trusting my own internal analytics for most of
the every-day queries I get from colleagues and students. But is that enough?
What about people unfortunate to possess a less highly developed sense of
self-regard than myself (how do they get through the day, incidentally)?
The notes and reading promise great strides
in corpus-based dictionaries. But again, these seem to promise explanations
after the fact, not so much ways of explaining concepts before it. Apart from
standing in front of the students and saying, “Some words just collocates with
others. Learn them,” how else are you meant to introduce this in the classroom?
Because “Lean them,” isn’t so far removed from. “because I said so.”
In the rush for more effective pedagogy, or
at least newer and more exciting pedagogy, a lot of the more traditional
methods – such as simple exposure and practice through repetition – can get
lost. Things move on, but we shouldn’t disregard these practices as useless just
because they’re old. That said, how should students go about studying semantic
prosody if not through repeated exposure to the target language?
The longer I work in this field, the more I
become convinced that Prosody (of the non-semantic flavor) is something that
can’t be taught or studied, it can only be acquired. I have colleagues who have
highly developed command of grammar and lexis but to hear them speak it’s still
very obvious that they’ve never spent significant time using English as a
functional, everyday language. Conversely I have returnee students who score
poorly on the written tests but I was able to pick as having lived abroad after
hearing just a single sentence from them.
Would semantic prosody be like (standard)
prosody in this regard? You can’t break it down to the stage where it can be
taught in the classroom, all you can do is flag it up and attempt to provide
enough exposure that students acquire it ‘naturally’. What’s ‘enough’? Is there
any hope in hell of reaching that in the classroom?
I hope I’m wrong about this, but at present
I can’t see how to make this work as a tangible, practical tool in the L2
classroom. If we look to use collocation to move beyond the ‘slot + filler’ conception
of how language works, are we not just using it to describe larger ‘slots’?
2.
Meow
For all that I’m slightly pessimistic about
the pedagogical applications of collocation, this was still a fascinating unit.
Almost too much to go at, which is why this will consist of the borderline rant
above and the following random quotes and thoughts. Order will emerge at some
point, I’m sure, just not now and not here…
“…there must be a continual appeal to a
shared norm of one sort or another or communication becomes impossible.”
(Carter,
p58)
Fairly decent working definition of a
lingua franca, that. Actually, scratch that, it’s a fairly decent working
definition of language full stop.
Carter also continues to bandy about the
words ‘style’ and ‘stylistic’ without really ever pinning them down, though for
large parts here it seems to be synonymous with register.
* *
* * *
“… the phraseological
tendency, the tendency of the speaker/writer to choose several words at a
time, and the terminological tendency,
the tendency of language users to protect the meaning of a word or phrase so
that every time in is used it guarantees delivery of a known meaning.”
(Sinclair 2004, p170)
I like the idea of language speakers ‘protecting’
meaning. There’s more to unpack here in due course regarding efficiency of
encoding and information transfer, I feel, but I’m not sure quite how yet.
“The structure of an English clause is said
to involve … categories [that] are mutually defining, and do not have meaning
until they are mapped into a set of choices.”
(Ibid p169)
“…the need to examine the context of an
item in order to determine its function or meaning.”
(Ibib p174)
So basically we’re looking at a linguistic
application of Schrödinger’s Cat. Lovely.
* *
* * *
And a final note on predictive text. As
with my (only half joking) assertion that a word is whatever Word says it is,
how exactly to programmers set up predictive texting? There has to be some
cross-over worth exploring, surely? Well, if nothing else it does provide for
some amusing screenshots -
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