Analysing and teaching meaning SSIS Lazio Lesson 2

Analysing and teaching meaning SSIS Lazio - Lesson 2 prof. Hugo Bowles January 2007 1

Lesson 2 - part 1 Collocation - word meaning and verbal context 2

Why do you say deep water and not profound water? n “A word is known by the company it keeps” (JR Firth) - tremble with fear tremble with excitement* - quiver with excitement quiver with fear* There is no definable reason why we choose to say “tremble with fear” but not “quiver with fear”. It is simply a question of COLLOCATION. 3

What is collocation? n n COLLOCATION refers to a relationship between words that frequently occur together The words together can mean more than the sum of their parts (The Times of India, disk drive) - other examples: hot dog, mother in law n Examples of collocations n noun phrases like strong tea and weapons of mass destruction phrasal verbs like to make up, and other phrases like the rich and powerful. Valid or invalid? n a stiff breeze but not a stiff wind (while either a strong breeze 4 or a strong wind is okay).

Collocational meaning (1) n Collocational meaning refers to the associations that a word acquires in its collocation: e. g. pretty girl boy woman flower garden colour village handsome boy man car overcoat airline typewriter vessel 5

Collocational meaning (2) n A word can gain different collocational meaning in different contexts: e. g. green on the job green fruit green with envy white man white wine white noise white coffee These different meanings of “green” and “white”are polysemous but they are caused by the different collocation, i. e. the change in verbal context 6

Criteria for collocations n Typical criteria for collocations: - non-compositionality - non-substitutability - non-modifiability. n Collocations usually cannot be translated into other languages word by word. n A phrase can be a collocation even if it is not consecutive (as in the example knock. . . door). 7

Non-compositionality n A phrase is compositional if the meaning can predicted from the meaning of the parts. n n A phrase is non-compositional if the meaning cannot be predicted from the meaning of the parts n n n e. g. new companies e. g. hot dog Collocations are not necessarily fully compositional in that there is usually an element of meaning added to the combination. e. g. strong tea. Idioms are the most extreme examples of noncompositionality. e. g. to hear it through the grapevine. 8

Non-substitutability n We cannot substitute near-synonyms for the components of a collocation. e. g. We can’t say yellow wine instead of white wine even though yellow is as good a description of the color of white wine as white is (it is kind of a yellowish white). n Many collocations cannot be freely modified with additional lexical material or through grammatical transformations (Non-modifiability). n n E. g. white wine, but not whiter wine mother in law, but not mother in laws 9

Linguistic Subclasses of Collocations n Light verbs: - Verbs with little semantic content like make, take and do. - e. g. make lunch, take easy, n Verb particle constructions - e. g. to go down n Proper nouns - e. g. Bill Clinton n Terminological expressions refer to concepts and objects in technical domains. - e. g. Hydraulic oil filter 10

Collocations at a distance n Many collocations occur at variable distances. For example knock collocates with door but at a distance - she knocked on his door - they knocked at the door - 100 women knocked on Donaldson’s door - a man knocked on the metal front door 11

Finding collocations n n Software is able to scan texts for the most frequently collocated words using the criterion of frequency, i. e. by counting the words which most frequently appear together This usually produces a lot of function words which need to be filtered out 12

An example of a frequency count n n This shows the most frequent collocations of pairs of words (bigrams) in a corpus of newspaper articles. The are all function words (except New York) 13

Frequency count after filtering This chart shows the most frequent collocations after filtering out the function words. The capital letters refer to the part of speech (A = Adjective, N = Noun) 14

Idioms - characteristics (1) Idioms are strictly non-compositional Although the word that make up the idiom have their own literal meanings, in the idiom they have lost their individual identity. You canot predict the meaning of an diom from the sum of its parts: e. g. how do you do? n I’m under the weather to wear your heart on your sleeve red herring 15

Idioms - characteristics (2) n Structural stability (syntactic frozenness) 1. Constituents cannot be replaced e. g. as good as gold / as good as play ? 2. Word order cannot be changed e. g. tit for tat / tat for tit? 3. Constituents cannot be deleted or added to e. g. out of the question / out of question ? 16

Lesson 2 - part 2 Teaching collocations and idioms. . “the pedagogic challenge is not to focus on the brand new, but instead to make accessible the relatively new“ (Skehan) 17

In which areas of language learning is collocation useful? n n Collocation occurs in speech and writing Teaching grammar through lexis - all levels Writing - all levels Translation - intermediate/advanced level Collocation is perhaps more important at intermediate and advanced levels but is is important to introducecollocation exercises with beginners as well. 18

How? n n Teaching individual collocations (activities and exercises) Making students aware of collocations (Noticing) Extending what students already know (delexicalised words) Storing collocations: organised lexical notebook 19

Which collocations? n n Unique collocations (foot the bill, shrug your shoulders) Strong collocations (ulterior motives, rancid butter, trenchant criticism, to be moved to tears) Medium collocations (to make a mistake, to be recovering from a major operation) Weak collocations (white wine, red hair, a black mood, a blue movie) It is more useful for learners if you teach the strong collocations 20

1. Make students aware of collocation n Teach students the word “collocation” and explain what it means. Collocation exists in the students’ native language so the concept will be easily understood. Use an example in Italian to illustrate the point 21

2. Raise awareness of miscollocation n Collocation is mostly about pairings of words so students will often use a miscollocation, e. g. high house Record the written mis-collocations of your students and bring them to class Point out spoken mis-collocations 22

3. Correct and collect n If a learner makes a collocation mistake, correct the mistake but give the student some extra collocations as well: e. g. S: I have to make an exam T: what verb do we use with “exam”? S: “take” T: that’s right; other verbs we could use are “to pass”, “to fail” or also “to retake” 23

4. Exploit what the learners already know n n Very often students know a lot of simple words but are not aware of them. Use these simple nouns and brainstorm adjectives and words that go with them. These collocations are often already known to the students but they have not yet internalised them 24

5. Get learners to extend what they know n Even when students get something right you can get students to extend their collocational knowledge e. g. S: T: I was very disappointed You could also say “bitterly” or “deeply” disappointed 25

6. Don’t explain - explore n Don’t spend too much time explaining words. It’s better to give a few contextualised examples of a word: e. g. T: yes, that’s a good point S: what does point mean? T: well, we can use point in different ways: “Why do you want me to do that? I can’t see the point”or “That’s a good point. I hadn’t thought of that” or “I always make a point of saying thank 26

7. Point out the collocations n n One reason why students don’t learn collocations is because teachers are too lazy to point them out to them in the texts they are using. Teachers often just ask: “are there any words you don’t know? ” Even if certain words are not new to the students, they are worth noticing and recording them together as collocations. 27

8. How to deal with a text Let the students identify the collocations and add the useful ones they haven’t identified. n Ask the students to underline useful ones and put them in their notebooks n Prepare texts where part of the collocation is left out and let the students fill in the gaps with the help of a collocation dictionary Use different types of text so students build up their mental lexicons in a balanced way n 28

9. Specific collocation exercise using synonyms n Synonyms: identify words appearing frequently in similar contexts Blast victims were helped by the neighbours Flu victims were helped by the doctors Crime victims were helped by the police n Collocations: identify synonyms that don’t appear in similar contexts Flu victims, flu sufferers Crime victims, crime sufferers? ? 29

8. Writing preparation Before writing a story or essay, brainstorm words connected with the topic. Collect important words which are central for the essay and add usful collocates to each word e. g. for a “school” topic you might give them “education”, “qualification” etc. n 30

10. Record and recycle n n n Encourage students to write down new collocations in special notebooks in a systematic order such as recording them in topic groups. It is important to repeat the content of the notebook in order to acquire it fully (recycling) Ways of recycling - create an incomplete list of collocations and get the students to fil in the gaps with the help of their notebooks 31

Use special notebooks for collocation n Get students to prepare a special lexicon for collocations. It is helpful to organise it like this: attract be subject to criticism deserve - do not record more than five collocates - use only strong and frequent collocates react to criticism 32

Collocational maps Another possibility is to organize collocations with ‘collocation maps like this one for “have”: Other phrases things/people Appearance/qualities Eat/drink/smoke do HAVE possess Feelings/ideas Have+noun (instead of verb) Illness/injuries 33

Teaching idioms n Since collocations and idioms have a lot in common they should be taught in a similar way e. g. identifying of idioms, guessing meaning from context, recording them in notebooks 34

Dictionaries n n n The LTP Dictionary of Selected Collocations Oxford Collocations Dictionary for Students of English Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms Collins COBUILD Dictionary of Idioms Oxford Dictionary of English Idioms 35

Concordancing software n Tapor freeware (this will give you concordances of any word in a text) n Wordsmith Tools (excellent but expensive) 36

Pedagogical implications n n n The important role of collocation in language learning implies a different language model - that lexis is more important than grammar when learning a second language. This is called the “lexical approach” Without necessarily adopting this lexical approach (COBUILD) you should always review your own syllabus and strategies and make sure you are teaching enough lexis and collocation 37