Re: Help with collocations, please

>

>> Django Cat wrote:
>> > This fine morning I'm working on the e-learning project on studies
>skills for
>> > Doctoral students I've been commissioned to develop. I'm writing
about
>how a
>> > knowledge of collocations is essential to develop academic writing
>skills, and
>> > I'm putting together a table of examples. (Collocations are words
which
>> > commonly hang out with each other in phrases which form accepted
blocks
>of
>> > meaning. In this context I'm looking especially at collocations with
>adjectives
>> > and adverbs).
>
>> > If anyone is interested, there's a rock paper about this stuff here:
>> > http://tinyurl.com/6zgfrz
>
>The draft 


>defines the topic

Is that a cliche? 

> as
>> This paper aims to show the relevance of phraseology to an
understanding
>of non-native
>> speaker Academic Writing, an approach that needs to be tentative if not
>stealthy at this stage
>> in the absence of large bodies of data. . . .
>>The term 'phraseology' has for a long time been used by Soviet
>lexicologists (Ginzburg et al >1966; Arnold 1986, for example) to refer
to
>the branch of lexicology that studies such familiar >complexes as
>collocations and idioms. There is still unfortunately a great deal of
>>terminological confusion and as yet no generally agreed superordinate
term
>for the study of >the full range of word combinations. This range
embraces,
>on the one hand, such structurally >well-defined collocations as address
a
>problem, jump through the hoops or play fast and >loose, and, on the
other
>hand, the much more disparate categories of expressions, such as
>proverbs,
>catchphrases and conversational formulae
>
>Problems 

>appear to include:

Is that a cliche?

>1.   This 4600-word draft is about what editors call cliches:
>but uses this term nowhere, and appears to rely for 

>source material

Is that a cliche?

> on a bibliography of 28-odd items in technical linguistics.
>No work on 

>good writing style

Is that a cliche?


> is cited.
>
>2.  This draft defines as its 

>subject matter

Is that a cliche?

> English written by
>non-native English speakers, 

>as distinct from

Is that a cliche?


> English written by
>native speakers.   

> So far as ... are concerned,

Is that a cliche?


>this separation may be impractical.   E.g. Henry Kissinger's

>mother tongue 

Is that a cliche?


>was German but he has since age 20 published
>millions of words in English.   Professionals in his community
>have no disciplinary way of dividing source texts between
>those by authors for whom English is a first or a second language.
>
>3.  The source idea ("phraseology" instead of cliche) is do***ented
>to two Moscow publications of 1968. It is not clear whether the
>objective is a typology of errors in English or a typology of correct
>English with defective or deplorable style.

Well, that's because it's not about either thing.

The paper is not about overuse of hackneyed expressions - cliches.  It's
about
collocations - multi-word combinations such as the ones you're using
above, and
which native speakers use every day - 'mother tongue' is a good example,
as is
'abundantly clear'. These combinations are neither defective or
deplorable,
they just exist.

Though Howarth doesn't use the term, it's also about 'chunking'; the way
we
learn language in multi-word elements and learn which words go together. 
So
blonde might mean 'pale browny-yellow', but even if you had a pale
browny-yellow car, you wouldn't say 'I've got a blonde car'; we learn that
blonde is an adjective that only goes with hair, by extension with people
with
blond/e hair (usually women), and, at a push, some continental lagers.  If
you're looking for a place to stay for the night you may want somewhere to
sleep and a meal the next morning, but you're going to get strange looks
and
not get very far if you ask for *'breakfast and bed' instead of 'bed and
breakfast'.

It's unfortunate that some of the first examples he gives - 'when in Rome'
'Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking...' are also pretty cliched, and
may
have given you the wrong impression of what the article is about - and if
I was
to teach these expressions I'd think of them as 'idioms', not
collocations.
How about two better examples from the next page - 'make a claim' and
'redress
the balance' - should those be avoided as cliches?  Next time you need to
claim
on your insurance policy are you going to think of another way of saying
'make
a claim' so as to avoid sounding cliched?  And isn't the person who reads
you
writing, lets say, *'propose a claim', going to think "that sounds a bit
weird... must be a foreigner"?  Are you going to try to find another way
of
saying 'mother tongue' now?  How about *'maternal language'?  That may
mean the
same thing semantically, but nobody's going to have a clue what you're on
about.  Like our man says:

'Pawley and Syder' s widely quoted study of lexicalization of word
combinations
comes to a similar conclusion: "Memorized sentences and phrases are the
normal
building blocks of fluent spoken discourse .... The attempt to find a
novel
turn of phrase to describe the familiar is ... likely to produce
dysfluencies:
it is easier to be commonplace." (1983: 208)' (But note they aren't saying
that
'the attempt to find a novel turn of phrase' is a bad thing in all
cir***stances - see what Howarth says later about newspaper leader
writiers)

Lack of knowledge of collocation is one of the things that makes
non-native
speakers - and writers - sound non-native. Here's Howarth again:

"Acceptance of the broad foundations of this approach would mean at the
minimum
that 'phraseological competence' is recognised as a component of a native
speaker's knowledge of the language. As Bolinger says: "a speaker who does
not
command this array [100s of 1000s of memorised sentence stems] does not
know
the language." (1985:69) If phraseological competence is essential for
native
speakerness, what does this mean for language learners? Do they have it?
and if
not, do they need it? and if so, how do they get it?"

I've spent much of the last 25 years wondering what the answer to that
last
question is.  What a bloody waste[1]; I could have been a brain
surgeon[2].

Anyway.  One of the early things we teach is collocation with 'make' and
'do' -
'do the shopping', 'make the beds' 'do the wa****ng up'.  Is 'make the bed'
a
cliche?  Or shall we all start doing the beds, instead?

Cheers

DC 

[1] That's one.
[2]So's that.

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