Day #116 — Silly little things called COLLOCATIONS — S01 E01
“No one learns how to speak a language just with grammar”. (Berber Sardinha, 2020)
The assertion above could well have come from author Michael Lewis (1993), the same who conceptualized the Lexical Approach. Simply put, language is either “grammaticalized lexis” or “lexicalized grammar”.
This analysis ultimately does not aid students in the process of learning another language. It does help them avoid what Hugh Dellar in a recent interview for Brazilian teachers of English, grammatically possible but socially improbable utterances.
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What helps learners IMMENSELY to communicate effectively ate combinations of words that often go together, or COLLOCATIONS. If there is one group of words that ratify the arbitrariness of language, they do the job. Why do we say “fake news” but “false facts? Why do talk about “personal goals’ but “scientific aims”? Since we’re in times of quarantine and Coronavirus lockdown, how come we usually hear of “contagious diseases” and “infectious bacteria”? And finally, why do we tend to tell others to “keep calm” and not “stay calm” or “remain calm” (the last two are also used, but probably not as often)?
This is the first of a series of ongoing posts around the topic, and a valuable resource anyone can use to look at how we really use language: corpus data. Corpus is a body of texts that can be recorded and collected electronically. Its sole concern is to show real occurrences of language in diverse contexts. These occurrences help us come up with patterns that indicate our preferences for certain words, phrases or even sentences. These silly little things CAN steal the happiness of those learning another language, if they are not aware of how COLLOCATIONS work.
Originally published at http://dablog-dablog.blogspot.com on April 26, 2020.
