Day #123 — Silly little things called COLLOCATIONS S01 E02
“Language is messy and sometimes one can be both”.
The quote is taken from the 2016 movie Arrival and belongs to xenolinguist Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams), as she tries to establish communication with alien visitors to our planet. The assertion applies much more to the languages that we are already familiar with and use to express our ideas and interact with others. This ‘episode” looks briefly at the role of grammar in a language as opposed to the record of how people put words together to communicate. The latter is basically the raison d’être of what is known as Corpus Linguistics, a branch within Applied Linguistics that identifies patterns in examples of language collected electronically. The patterns, in turn, reflect the functional aspect of sentences — how they are used to be formal or informal, to adhere to social norms or conventions (things we should say in everyday situations) — and the meanings that these utterances convey — what a word means in a dictionary and the attributions people make to that word.
When we consider the way we string words together and the choices of one word rather than another that might be similar in meaning, taking a closer look at how words ook at the data before us and and make inferences. These observations tend to go against what we expect to see happening in the language or to what we were told by a so-called COLLOCATE means going beyond the grammatical rules and dictionary definitions we tend to rely on. These are invaluable resources that might mislead into believing that any other combination is flat out wrong or inappropriate. Analysing a corpus allows us to l native speaker of the language then they are exploring language use. The discussion here will most likely make loads of sense to language learners around the world, but the post is likely to resonate with people living in ultra cosmopolitan cities like New York, Vancouver, London or Sydney, in which multiple languages abound, contact languages emerge and the intelligible holds more sway than the grammatically acceptable.
To exemplify, English learners have a hard time making sense of how we refer to the future — do we use the Present Continuous to talk about scheduled events, the ‘Be going to + verb” form for intentions or predictions based on visible evidence and the “will + verb” form to refer to spontaneous decisions or long term future plans. A search on either the Corpus of Contemporary American English or The British National Corpus reveals how messy the use of these forms can be, especially as they often occur interchangeably, driving teachers and learners alike insane.
Another example, this time with words that are similar in meaning, reinforces the need for anyone committed to language as an object of study or to learning a language in particular to become a BELIEVER OF COLLOCATION. The data does not betray us; on the contrary, it enlightens us more than we might think
Every student is a learner, but every learner is not a student.
It does make sense, if we consider the distinction between formal instruction and informal learning. Corpus research is able to tell us that learner has to do with the style or speed at which we acquire knowledge and student is often used to levels of study, gender or ethnicity.
Again, grammar based material and dictionary tools aid us a lot; as presenter Elizabeth Manning stated, grammar is the communication code we all share and use to communicate clearly in writing and in speech. That, however, does not ANNUL the importance of CORPUS EVIDENCE: if the data is there, then we can’t afford to ignore it. Finding evidence of how the language is used apparently has much better chance of equipping its users to master it when the need arises.
Originally published at http://dablog-dablog.blogspot.com on May 3, 2020.
