Hi, Listers
I suppose many of you are interested in being more fluent in the languages
you sing and/or speak. I think the best contribution of science in that area
in the last 20 years or so ( after 'communicative approach' in foreign
language acquisition ) is corpus linguistics and its collocations. I'm
posting this msg and the links below in order to help you improve your
language skills and develop fluency ( oh, that elusive word ).
I'll try to explain briefly, and within my restraints, what corpus
linguistics and collocations are about:
Corpus linguistics works with computer databases of recorded conversations
from interviews, radio and TV shows ), books, magazines, literature, etc.
All that information is stored and organized so that linguists can study how
they were used by a certain ethnical or social group, author, media
shouldn't that be medium? ), in a certain region, etc. So, if they type in
the word "play", they may have this output ( which I'll copy from my
dictionary, which was written using sentences from "Birmingham University
International Language Database" ):
... It would appear that hormones PLAY A CRUCIAL ROLE in precipitating...
...area, and politics has to PLAY A PART in the Deputy
Speaker's...
... it wasn't him. He obviously PLAYED A ROLE, but it was those
young...
and so on.
When linguists analyzed all that information they noticed that there was a
tendency of some patterns to repeat themselves. That is, certain
conbinations of words ( in caps above ) were recurring, although native
speakers might have a wide viriety of words from which to build phrases
from. Those combinations ( now called 'collocations' ) could be so closely
related that, whenever you asked people to freely associate words to 'play'
to form a sentence, for instance, they would use those same combinations
from now on, collocations ). Of course, what differentiates good authors
from 'normal' speakers is that they don't have those limitations ( at least
in writing ), although they tend to repeat their own collocations in their
books.
What's important here is to notice that some collocations are so frequent
and others so fixed ( don't allow any or many re-arrangements ) that those
words should be learned in combination. As an English teacher, I can give
you a practical example: for most speakers of Romance languages, the
difference between 'do' and 'make' is pure metaphysics, since we have only
one word for both. Therefore, you're much likely to hear us say 'do a
mistake', instead of 'make a mistake'. Corpus linguistics makes it very
clear: native speakers don't think of that; they just repeat what they
repeatedly heard before!
And what has that got to do with fluency? That's simple: native speakers
speak fast not just because they know the words, but they automatically
combine them without giving it a thought. That's what makes uneducated
native speakers still be fluent: they don't need a lot of words to be
fluent, only to know ( by heart ) how to collocate them.
As a consequence, foreign learners of any language should do the same:
Instead of learning the words 'mistake' and 'make' as different words, they
should learn 'make a mistake' as if they were one word only, so as to avoid
mixing collocations typical in their native languages with those of the
targeted ones.
For more information about Corpus Linguistics and collocations, you may want
to try this tutorial ( I haven't tried it, so... ):
http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/monkey/ihe/linguistics/contents.htm
For access to on-line corpora ( 1 corpus, 2 corpora: computer databases) or
CD-ROM collocational dictionaries and corpora for very many different
languages ( including ITALIAN!!!!!!!!!! ):
http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~barlow/corpus.html
Books about corpus linguistics and collocations:
There are two books for ESL/EFL teachers ( that may be helpful for teachers
of any language ): The Lexical Approach and Implementing the Lexical
Approach. Both by Michael Lewis and published by his own house, LTP
Language.
Dictionary of collocations: the only one I've found is LTP Dictionary of
Selected Collocations, although I know there are more published.
And the only ESL/EFL book I've found is British and brand-new:
"Innovations", Dellar and Hocking, also LTP Language. It's a very
interesting book. Completely different from anything I've seen.
I hope that was helpful.
Bye,
Caio Rossi
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