Phraseology in English Academic Writing: Some implications for language learning and dictionary making [Reprint 2013 ed.] 9783110937923, 9783484309753

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Series Maior

LEXICOGRAPHICA Series Maior Supplementary Volumes to the International Annual for Lexicography Suppléments à la Revue Internationale de Lexicographie Supplementbände zum Internationalen Jahrbuch für Lexikographie

Edited by Sture Allén, Pierre Corbin, Reinhard R. K. Hartmann, Franz Josef Hausmann, Ulrich Heid, Oskar Reichmann, Ladislav Zgusta 75

Published in cooperation with the Dictionary Society of North America (DSNA) and the European Association for Lexicography (EURALEX)

Peter Andrew Howarth

Phraseology in English Academic Writing Some implications for language learning and dictionary making

Max Niemeyer Verlag Tübingen 1996

To Clare Hollowell

Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP-Einheitsaufnahme [Lexicographica / Series maior] Lexicographica : supplementary volumes to the International annual for lexicography / pubi, in cooperation with the Dictionary Society of North America (DSNA) and the European Association for Lexicography (EURALEX). Series maior. - Tubingen : Niemeyer. Früher Schriftenreihe Reihe Series maior zu: Lexicographica NE: International annual for lexicography / Supplementary volumes 75. Howarth, Peter Andrew: Phraseology in English academic writing. - 1996 Howarth, Peter Andrew: Phraseology in English academic writing : some implications for language learning and dictionary making / Peter Andrew Howarth. - Tübingen : Niemeyer, 1996 (Lexicographica : Series maior ; 75) ISBN 3-484-30975-X

ISSN 0175-9264

© Max Niemeyer Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, Tübingen 1996 Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. Printed in Germany. Gedruckt auf alterungsbeständigem Papier. Druck: Weihert-Druck GmbH, Darmstadt Einband: Industriebuchbinderei Hugo Nadele, Nehren

Contents Abstract Résumé Zusammenfassung Introduction

EX XI XIII 1

1 The Classification of Word Combinations 1.0 Introduction 1.1 The classification of word combinations 1.2 Clichés 1.3 Composite units 1.4 Idioms 1.4.1 Non-technical definitions 1.4.2 Structuralism 1.4.3 Transformational Grammar 1.4.4 Other Western views of idioms 1.4.5 The Russian perspective on idioms 1.4.6 The classification of figurative and pure idioms 1.4.6.1 The semantic unity of idioms 1.4.6.2 Motivation 1.5 Collocation 1.5.1 Firth on collocation 1.5.2 The Neo-Firthians 1.5.3 Objections to the Firthian perspective 1.5.4 Collocation and colligation 1.6 Russian phraseology 1.7 Criteria for the classification of composite units 1.7.1 Syntactic patterns 1.7.2 Institutionalization 1.7.2.1 The institutionalization of free collocations 1.7.2.2 The institutionalization of restricted collocations 1.7.3 Semantic transparency/opacity 1.7.3.1 The semantic transparency of free collocations 1.7.3.2 The semantic transparency of restricted collocations 1.7.4 Commutability 1.7.4.1 Commutability in free collocations 1.7.4.2 Commutability in restricted collocations 1.7.5 Syntactic restriction 1.7.5.1 Syntactic restrictions on free collocations 1.7.5.2 Syntactic restrictions on restricted collocations 1.7.5.3 Syntactic restrictions on idioms 1.8 Summary of the framework 1.9 Conclusion

5 5 7 12 14 14 15 17 17 20 22 23 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 32 34 36 37 37 38 38 38 41 41 43 45 45 45 46 46 47

2 The Processing of Conventional Language 2.0 Introduction 2.1 The Mental Lexicon

48 48 49

VI

2.1.1 Processing complex entries 2.1.2 Lexical ambiguity 2.2 Processing idiomatic expressions 2.2.1 Idiom List Hypothesis 2.2.2 Lexical Representation Hypothesis 2.3 Idioms as conventional expressions 2.4 Metaphorical language 2.4.1 The processing of novel metaphors 2.5 Selectional restrictions in processing 2.6 Lateralization 2.7 Implications of psycholinguistic research 2.8Bolinger 2.9 Pawley and Syder 2.10 Conclusion 3 The Analysis of Native-speaker Academic Writing 3.0 Introduction 3.1 Phraseology in speech and writing 3.1.1 Academic prose in the social sciences 3.2 Corpus linguistics 3.2.1 Automatic collocational analysis 3.3 Corpus composition 3.3.1 Software 3.4 Method 3.4.1 Preparation of the data 3.4.2 Verb patterns 3.4.3 Exclusions and additions 3.4.4 Support from published authorities 3.5 Analysis 3.6 Syntactic patterns 3.6.1 Issues in the identification of verb patterns 3.6.2 Verb pattern results 3.7 Institutionalization 3.8 Semantic specialization 3.8.1 Literal meaning 3.8.2 Technical meaning 3.8.3 Delexicality 3.8.4 Figurative meaning 3.9Commutability 3 .9.1 Application of the criterion of commutability 3.9.2 Level 1 3.9.3 Level 2 3.9.4 Level 3 3.9.5 Level 4 3.9.6 Level 5 3.10 Semantic unity / Motivation 3.11 Summary 3.12 Collocational complexes 3.13 Native-speaker deviation 3.13.1 Grammatical modification

49 50 51 51 52 53 58 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 65 66 68 68 69 75 76 77 78 81 82 83 84 84 86 89 90 90 91 92 94 98 101 104 105 106 Ill 113 115 116 117 122 124 125

VII 3.13.2 Lexical substitution 3.13.3 Borderline deviation 3.13.4 Technical collocations 3.13.5 Creativity 3.14 Conclusion

126 129 129 130 131

4 The Phraseology of Non-native Academic Writing 4.0 Introduction 4.1 Needs of the learner 4.2 The acquisition of L2 phraseology 4.3 Empirical studies of L2 phraseology 4.4 Non-native data 4.4.1 The data 4.4.2 Disciplines 4.4.3 The writers 4.4.4 Corpus versus essay 4.4.5 Data preparation 4.4.6 The corpus 4.4.7 Procedure 4.5 Analysis 4.6 Syntactic pattern 4.7 Institutionalization 4.8 Semantic specialization 4.8.1 Technical meaning 4.8.2 Delexicality 4.8.3 Figurative meaning 4.9 Commutability 4.9.1 Errors in overlapping collocations 4.9.2 Blends 4.10 Idioms 4.11 Summary 4.12 Conclusion

133 133 134 136 138 140 140 141 141 142 142 143 144 144 145 146 147 147 148 148 149 151 154 156 156 159

5 Collocational Dictionaries for Learners of English 5.0 Introduction 5.1 Learners' collocational deficit 5.2 Learning and teaching collocations 5.3 Collocations in pedagogical lexicography 5.4 Collocations and idioms in general monolingual learners' dictionaries 5.4.1 Encoding and decoding 5.5 Collocations and idioms in general learners' dictionaries 5.6 Dictionaries of idioms 5.7 Dictionaries of collocations 5.7.1 Issues of selection in dictionaries of collocations 5.7.2 The presentation of collocations 5.8 BBI and SEC 5.9 Restricted collocations in BBI and SEC 5.10 Overlapping collocations in BBI and SEC 5.11 Conclusion

162 162 162 163 170 170 171 171 173 174 176 176 178 180 182 189

Vili Conclusion

191

Appendices Appendix I Appendix Π

195 195 217

References

225

Abstract The study reported here examines the use of prefabricated language in the production of native and non-native writers of English. In particular, it investigates the role that conventional lexical collocations play in the academic style of the social sciences, in an attempt to throw light on a neglected aspect of learner competence. In order to do this, it first surveys the existing theoretical viewpoints on word combinations, fixed expressions and collocations and develops a framework within which one specific category can best be described in detail: restricted collocations. It then reviews experimental research into the psycholinguistic processing of prefabricated language, which suggests that the significance of such multi-word units is that they are stored in the mental lexicon as wholes and are used as conventional expressions to facilitate fluent production and rapid comprehension. A computer-based corpus of native academic writing is analysed to discover to what extent such collocations are found in formal written English and how they are used. In spite of a certain amount of deviation from expected norms, this style is found to be conventional in the use of collocations. Conventionality of style, it is suggested, aids precision of expression, clearly a quality highly valued in academic argument. A corpus of advanced learner writing is then subjected to a similar analysis. This corpus consists of academic essays produced by overseas postgraduate students attending a UK university. While the collocational errors they make do not on the whole seriously destroy intelligibility, they can lead to a lack of precision and obscure the clarity required in academic communication. Pedagogical implications are then considered, and it is seen that for the most part published teaching materials have failed to recognize the nature of collocations and oifer little help. The final part of the study examines the treatment of restricted collocations in general and phraseological dictionaries for learners. These are evaluated on their selection and presentation of collocations shown by the preceding research to be problematic for advanced learners. The conclusion suggests that, for such learners, who are mostly studying the language independently, good reference works are needed in the form of specialist collocational dictionaries. The results of this research help to establish principles for the design of such dictionaries.

Résumé La présente étude examine l'utilisation des expressions âgées dans la production des écrivains d'expression anglaise. Dans le but d'éclaircir un aspect négligé de la compétence de l'apprenant elle étudie particulièrement le rôle que les collocations lexicales conventionnelles jouent dans le style académique des sciences humaines. Après un rappel des points de vue théoriques existants en ce qui concerne la combinaison des mots, les expressions figées et les collocations, elle développe également un cadre de travail dans lequel une catégorie particulière peut être mieux décrite en détail: les collocations restreintes. L'étude passe ensuite en revue les recherches expérimentales sur le traitement psycholinguistique des expressions figées qui suggère que l'importance de telles unités complexes tient à ce qu'elles sont enregistrées telles qu'elles dans le lexique mental puis utilisées en tant qu'expressions conventionnelles pour faciliter une expression aisée et une compréhension rapide. Un corpus de textes académiques écrits, rédigés par des locuteurs natifs, basé sur ordinateur est analysé pour découvrir d'une part jusqu'à quel point de telles collocations sont présentes en anglais soutenu écrit et d'autre part comment elles sont utilisées. Malgré certaines divergences par rapport à la norme attendue, il s'avère que ce style est conventionnel dans l'utilisation des collocations. L'on suggère que la conventionale du style contribue à la précision de l'expression, qualité hautement recherchée dans l'argumentation académique. Un corpus d'écrits produits par des apprenants d'un niveau avancé est ensuite soumis à une analyse similaire. Ce corpus consiste en une collection de dissertations produites par des étudiants de troisième cycle étrangers fréquentant une université britannique. Même si les erreurs de collocations réalisées n'affectent pas sérieusement l'intelligibilité, elles peuvent cependant conduire à un manque de précision et nuire à la clareté souhaitée en communication académique. L'examen des implications pédagogiques souligne le fait que la plupart du matériel pédagogique disponible ne reconnaît pas la nature des collocations et est de très peu de secours. La partie finale de cette étude examine le traitement des collocations restreintes dans les dictionnaires d'usage et les dictionnaires phraséologiques pour apprenants. Ceux-ci sont évalués au niveau de la sélection et de la présentation des collocations dont cette recherche a montré à quel point elles sont problématiques pour apprenants d'un niveau avancé. La conclusion suggère que pour de telles personnes qui, pour la plupart étudient la langue d'une manière indépendante, de bons ouvrages de références sous forme de dictionnaires de collocations spécialisés sont nécessaires. Les résultats de cette étude aident à établir les principes pour la conception de tels dictionnaires.

Zusammenfassung Die hier vorgestellte Studie untersucht den Gebrauch vorgefertigter Sprache in der englischen Schriftproduktion bei Muttersprachlern und Nicht-Muttersprachlern. Insbesondere erforscht sie die Rolle, die konventionelle lexikalische Kollokationen im akademischen Stil der Sozialwissenschaften spielen, und wirft damit Licht auf einen vernachlässigten Aspekt der Lernerkompetenz. Zu diesem Zweck werden zunächst die bestehenden theoretischen Standpunkte zu Wortverbindungen, festen Redewendungen und Kollokationen betrachtet und ein Rahmen entwickelt, innerhalb dessen eine bestimmte Kategorie am besten im Detail beschrieben werden kann: die der eingeschränkten Kollokationen. Die Studie faßt die experimentelle Forschung im Bereich der psycholinguistischen Verarbeitung vorgefertigter Sprache zusammen, die darauf hindeutet, daß die Bedeutung solcher Multi-Worteinheiten darin liegt, daß sie als ganzes im geistigen Lexikon gespeichert werden und als konventionelle Wendungen eingesetzt werden, um flüssige Produktion und schnelles Verständnis zu erleichtern. Ein maschinenlesbares Korpus muttersprachlicher akademischer Texte wird analysiert um herauszufinden, inwieweit solche Kollokationen im formellen Schriftenglisch auftauchen und wie sie gebraucht werden. Trotz einer gewissen Abweichung von erwarteten Normen erweist sich dieser Stil als konventionell im Gebrauch von Kollokationen. Konventionalität im Stil, so die Deutung, fördert die Präzision des Ausdrucks, eindeutig eine Qualität, die einen hohen Stellenwert in der akademischen Argumentation besitzt. Ein Korpus von Texten fortgeschrittener Lerner wird dann einer ähnlichen Analyse unterzogen. Dieses Korpus besteht aus akademischen Essays, die Postgraduierte aus Übersee während ihres Aufenthalts an einer britischen Universität geschrieben haben. Während allgemein die kollokationalen Fehler, die ihnen unterlaufen, nicht ernsthaft das Verständnis unmöglich machen, können diese zu einem Mangel an Präzision führen und die in akademischer Kommunikation notwendige Klarheit verstellen. Pädagogische Implikationen werden erörtert, und es wird argumentiert, daß gängige Lehrmaterialien größtenteils die Natur von Kollokationen nicht erkannt haben und wenig Hilfestellung leisten. Der letzte Teil der Studie untersucht die Behandlung eingeschränkter Kollokationen im allgemeinen und phraseologische Wörterbücher für Lernende. Diese werden aufgrund ihrer Auswahl und Präsentation von Kollokationen bewertet, deren Erwerb sich aufgrund der vorhergehenden Forschung als problematisch für fortgeschrittene Lerner erwiesen hat. Der Schluß weist darauf hin, daß für solche Lernende, die die Sprache meist unabhängig lernen, gute Referenzwerke in Form von speziellen Kollokationswörterbüchern notwendig sind. Die Resultate dieser Untersuchung tragen dazu bei, Prinzipien für die Erstellung solcher Wörterbücher aufzustellen.

Introduction Background The study reported here focuses on the written academic performance in English of non-native students in a UK university. It is prompted by the experience of a teacher who both lectures in an academic subject within the social sciences to groups of predominantly overseas postgraduate students and also provides language training in English for Academic Purposes for similar students. He therefore has an interest in evaluating their written language both from the point of view of linguistic proficiency and as evidence of academic ability. From this dual perspective it is apparent that, in attempting to fulfil the very demanding requirements of academic assessment, even advanced non-native writers may fail to communicate effectively their understanding of the subject matter for reasons of incomplete linguistic competence rather than academic weakness. This lack of proficiency takes many forms and can be seen at all levels of linguistic description, from word formation to the discourse structure of texts. These chiefly correspond to traditional categories of language study (grammar, vocabulary and discourse), which teachers, lecturers and the writers themselves recognize and understand. However, there is a type of error that many learners are unaware οξ that most teachers can identify as a problem though generally cannot describe, but which can have an appreciable impact on the effectiveness of a piece of writing. They are not all major errors in themselves and the degree to which intelligibility is affected varies, though the cumulative effect can be a serious loss of precision. For example, the following extracts were found in non-native students' essays: • Children adopt their natural tendencies to discover grammar. • Most objections which assumed washback effects cannot be carried. • Consequences ... which bears very important influence upon the future of students. The difficulty for teachers attempting to describe such instances is that the cause of the error is not a simple matter of the breaking of general rules of the language (though there may in addition be grammatical errors) nor of the mis-selection of individual vocabulary items. It is a matter of how words in a language typically combine, and understanding the phenomenon involves considering both structure and lexis. As their proficiency develops, learners are led to believe that words combine either according to syntactic and semantic rules, or in fixed expressions such as proverbs and idioms. In reality, combinations of the latter kind, though prominent when they occur, are used infrequently, especially in the formal written texts of concern to academic writers. Furthermore, it has been claimed that the proportion of combinations produced entirely by rule is much smaller than is often assumed. Of far greater significance (as potential problems for learners) are the very large number of word combinations (which will be referred to as 'collocations') that are much less fixed in form than idioms, but whose elements (as in the examples above) are not completely free to associate. The key notion in understanding and describing this limit on freedom to combine is 'restrictedness', and it is with 'restricted collocations' that this study will chiefly be concerned.

2

Hypotheses The line of argument running through the study and the hypotheses that will be tested are as follows: 1. Collocations of varying degrees of restrictedness are an important part of the linguistic system However, they are inadequately understood, and to date 'phraseology' (the study of fixed expressions) has failed to recognize fully their importance. By examining collocations more closely it is possible to develop a descriptive framework that will reveal the significant part they play in native-speaker competence. 2. Their significance can be accounted for by the role that they play as conventional expressions in native-speakers' production and comprehension of language. 3. It can also be shown that in native-speaker performance restricted collocations make a significant contribution to appropriate academic style. It is possible to establish a collocational profile of written texts on the basis of a scale of restrictedness. 4. Restricted collocations pose a problem for learners, as a result of the complex nature of restrictedness, which has largely been ignored by teachers. 5. Insufficient assistance is available to learners from teachers (in the form of published materials) and from reference works. In particular, there is great scope for learners' dictionaries to develop techniques for the more effective treatment of collocational restrictedness. Purpose These arguments will be developed in the pursuit of the main aims of the study, which are to: 1. describe the place of restricted collocations in native-speaker linguistic competence; 2. investigate the role of conventional word combinations in language processing; 3. analyse native performance in a substantial quantity of written texts and establish norms of collocational use, including the extent to which native writers deviate from such norms; 4. analyse the performance of non-native writers, compare their use of collocations with that of native writers and draw conclusions about learners' phraseological competence; and 5. examine the available resources, such as general and collocational dictionaries, for advanced learners to develop such competence independently.

3 Outline The research is reported in five chapters, the main focus of each of which is as follows: 1. Chapter One surveys the full range of word combinations and shows how they can be classified by functional and formal means. Although idioms do not play a very large part in the later chapters, attention must be given to their place in phraseological theory. The focus is then narrowed to collocations, and the various theoretical viewpoints are reviewed. A framework is developed for the analysis of collocations and idioms with particular emphasis on differentiating between degrees of restrictedness. 2. In Chapter Two the role of fixed expressions in language processing is investigated by surveying experimental findings from psycholinguistic research into the effect such expressions have in facilitating comprehension. The conclusions from these studies are shown to extend by implication to the category of restricted collocations. 3. Chapter Three, the major part of the whole research, describes and evaluates methods of collocational analysis based on computer corpora of natural language. The corpus of written material to be analysed here is discussed, the framework outlined in Chapter One is applied, and both quantitative and qualitative results reported and discussed. Finally, evidence is presented of native-writer deviation from conventional norms of collocational use. 4. At the beginning of Chapter Four the need that learners of English have for phraseological competence is discussed, and is tested against a body of learner academic writing, analysed by means of the same framework used in Chapter Three. Non-native deviation from collocational norms is described and compared with the native deviation previously identified. 5. Finally, Chapter Five examines approaches to the teaching of collocations in the light of the description of non-native performance in Chapter Four. As an alternative to the formal teaching of collocations, the use of collocational dictionaries is discussed and their effectiveness evaluated against the learner data. Issues it is clear from the outset that there are many difficult issues that will need to be addressed during the research. 1. Some of these issues arise from the apparent absence in the literature of theoretical and descriptive studies of this aspect of phraseology, related to and perhaps the result of the amount of attention traditionally paid to idioms. As a consequence, there is no firmly established descriptive framework in which restricted collocations can be placed. Much of this work still needs to be done. 2. There is an almost total lack of experimental data on the psycholinguistic processing of collocations. Again this is partly due to the dominance of research into the comprehension of idioms.

4 3. In empirical analysis of written texts there are decisions to be made about the size and composition of the body of data. Since it is possible today to process large amounts of material by computer, there is a consequent tendency to believe that computers can do much of the analysis as well. This is one of the most controversial questions to be faced. 4. In describing the collocational performance of learners and identifying their errors, it is necessary to bear in mind that these writers are performing at a high level of proficiency, and their errors may not be regarded as serious. However, deviation from norms must be seen in relation to learners' purposes: teachers of English and translators, for example, set themselves very high standards of performance, which will involve proficiency in phraseology. 5. Caution must be exercised in discussing innovations in dictionary design, in view of the major commitment that developments in lexicography represent in both time and financial resources. In light of the limitations and reservations outlined here, many of the conclusions drawn from the research must be tentative. Academic writing has not been analysed in this way before, and some of the descriptive methods must be seen as experimental (not having previously been applied to large bodies of text). It is hoped, however, that, in the attempt to test the hypotheses set out above, some light will be shed on an aspect of language that many learners and teachers immediately recognize. Once the phenomenon has been described to them in the appropriate way, they can appreciate the important role that it plays in effective communication.

Chapter One The Classification of Word Combinations 1.0 Introduction There is a considerable diversity of combinations of words that are significant in the language use of native speakers of English, in not being simply ordinary sequences of individual lexical items but functioning as larger units in communication. The following list indicates this variety, though it may not be initially clear from the examples what the extent and nature of the full range is: (1) ulterior motive (2) gin and tonic (3) against all odds (4) put pen to paper (5) kick the bucket (6) Haw do you do? (7) Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking (8) Please tender exact fare and state destination (9) ... so to speak (10) You name it, we 've got it (11) When in Rome ... (12) More haste less speed (13) 1992 and all that The items in the above list correspond to a variety of syntactic units: phrase (1), clause (5) or sentence (8). They also differ in stylistic value: for example, (10) could be subjectively evaluated as a cliché. In (13) one can recognize a literary allusion to the book title 1066 And All That. While some may be typical of spoken English (6,7), others would only appear in written form (8). The items also represent a range of language functions: some have a primarily discourse function, as comments by the speaker/writer on the state or stage of the discourse for the benefit of the audience (9). Others are potentially complete communicative events in themselves (6) and illustrate the broad area of speech formulas with specialized communicative functions such as 'greeting'. (12) is easily recognizable as a proverb, though the status of (11) is rather less clear, since it originates in a complete sentence ( When in Rome, do as the Romans do), but is frequently reduced to a grammatically incomplete expression without, of course, losing its intelligibility. This appears to be a very disparate collection, and it is the aim of this chapter to show how they can be classified. A useful point of departure is to examine what is meant by 'significant' (a concept that recurs throughout the study) and to what extent it is a notion that can be defined linguistically. At a non-technical level native speakers would recognize these expressions as familiar (to varying degrees, depending on their background and social experience). Mackin (1978) discusses methods for eliciting native speakers' knowledge of such lexical combinations through completion tests, which are assumed to reveal information about the relative familiarity of certain expressions and how variable they might be. While techniques aimed at determining familiarity might be useful for specific purposes such as lexicography,

6 they are unable to explain the phenomenon, and this property remains too intangible to be used as a theoretical term. Other linguists (eg Jones and Sinclair 1974), wary of reliance on such native speaker introspection, interpret the notion of significance as recurrence or frequency, attempting to identify quantitatively those combinations that are distinctive through the relative frequency of their occurrences in a text. The weaknesses in this approach will be examined in detail at a later point in the argument; for the present it is sufficient to note that this view takes no account of any psychological aspects of significance, such as the role that the use of familiar expressions might have in language production and comprehension, nor the internal grammatical or lexical structure of an expression. For a study interested in language learning these are important factors. The view taken here is that it is the conventionality of word combinations that gives them linguistic significance: • they are conventional forms that have a significant role in language production; • this is partly because they are memorized as ready-made lexical units, or 'prefabricated', to use Bolinger's (1976) term; • they are stored together with some indication of their grammatical structure and syntactic and pragmatic function; and • as a result they are recognized as familiar by native-speaker readers/hearers both as regards their form and their associated functions. Although considerable interest has been shown in prefabricated language for a number of years, there is a lack of common descriptive approach and no consensus on the analytical procedures to be followed. There is, as yet, no generally-agreed overall term encompassing the whole spectrum, though there seems to be a growing acceptance of 'phraseology' as a convenient name for the field of study (the "sub-discipline of lexicology [which studies] fixed expressions" (Alexander (1987)), and this term will be used in the present study. More critically, it will be seen that there is great diversity in the terms used to cover the whole range of linguistic items under discussion and in the criteria used for identifying and labelling specific categories. There is a difficulty for any analyst in deciding on a term or set of terms that will embrace all the above examples and relate them to one another according to appropriate lexical, grammatical and semantic criteria. Linguists have attempted to find terms that are sufficiently broad and at the same time uncoloured by associations that will preclude certain labels pre-theoretically. For this reason, any term including the word 'phrase' or 'group' has often been avoided, since it might seem to limit the focus to a specific syntactic unit. The main reason for this lack of consistency lies in the way in which most of those with an interest in prefabricated language have focused on only a part of the whole spectrum of such expressions: for example, Fernando and Flavell (1981), Fraser (1970), Weinreich (1969) on what they have called 'idioms' (for example, number (5) above); Aisenstadt (1979), Bäcklund (1976), Cowie (1991), Greenbaum (1970), Sinclair (1991) on various types of expression referred to as 'collocations' (1); and Coulmas (1979), Ferguson (1976), Ruiper and Austin (1990), Pawley (1985b) on 'speech formulas' (6-9), to give just a small sample. Few of these have been concerned with placing these types in the wider framework of the complete range (but see Alexander (1984), Cowie (1988), Gläser (1988), Nattinger (1980) and the Russian phraseologists (§1.6 below) for various attempts at an overview). Secondly, interest in the phenomenon has developed almost independently in a number of language-related disciplines: descriptive linguistics (Fillmore et al 1988, Gläser 1988), lexicography (Aisenstadt 1979, Cowie 1981b), corpus linguistics (Altenberg & Eeg-Oloflson 1990, Kjellmer 1991, Sinclair 1991), artificial intelligence (Becker 1975), language processing

7 (Bolinger 1976, Pawley & Syder 1983, Peters 1983), discourse analysis (Ferguson 1976, Tannen 1989), second language acquisition research (Hakuta 1974) and second language pedagogy (Alexander 1984, Nattinger & DeCarrico 1992). Linguists identified with different theoretical traditions have also taken a variety of approaches: TG linguistics (Katz and Postal 1963), Firthian linguistics (Firth 1957a, Halliday 1966, Sinclair 1991), British lexicology (Mackin 1978, following Palmer and Hornby (see for example IRET 1933)) and Russian phraseology (Arnold 1986). Although in the former Soviet Union phraseology has long been recognized as a discipline in its own right, in the West it is only fairly recently that attempts have been made to stimulate interdisciplinary discussion in order to raise awareness of the common threads running through this breadth of activity (see the work of Europhras (in Greciano 1989) and Cowie (forthcoming)). This chapter aims to review the various approaches to English phraseology that have been adopted in order to lay the foundations for the later empirical investigation of one part of the whole spectrum in the writing of both native speakers and advanced learners. It will firstly discuss those studies that have attempted to encompass the complete picture and then progressively narrow its focus to consider in detail the analysis of one limited part of the range. For the purposes of a preliminary survey of the literature which makes reference to the full range of expressions, I shall use 'word combination' to refer to all those expressions which recur in a relatively stable form in the language and which speakers/writers potentially manipulate as wholes. 1.1 The classification of word combinations Looking first at attempts to describe the full range of word combinations, it is clear that, while some writers have developed a framework according to a principled approach to description, others have produced ad hoc taxonomies based on a mixture of structural, stylistic and pragmatic criteria, thus making their terminology unreliable. Nattinger and DeCarrico (1992), as an example of the second tendency, use 'lexical phrase' as the overarching term, taking this term uncritically from Becker (1975). The following four categories are adapted from Becker's classification (1992:38-44): a. polywords (short phrases which function very much like individual lexical items, allowing no variability: expressing speaker qualification, summarizing, shifting topics etc) eg for the most part, by the way, hold your horses., b. institutionalized expressions (of sentence length, usually functioning as separate utterances: proverbs, aphorisms, formulas for social interaction) eg how do you do?, how are you? c. phrasal constraints (short- to medium-length phrases: wide variety of functions) eg α — ago, — as well as — ; d. sentence builders (providing the framework for whole sentences); eg Not only X but also

Y: Nattinger and DeCarrico are concerned, as are Alexander (1984, 1987) and Cowie (1988), with the vocabulary development of L2 learners, but there is insufficient information

Nattinger (1980) additionally takes from Becker's taxonomy 'deictic locutions' (marking attitude etc: eg as 'situational utterances' (clichés, phatic speech: eg How can I ever repay you?) and 'verbatim texts' (quotation, allusion etc).

Jar ax I know, I mean to say)',

8 concerning the criteria for distinguishing between these categories to make possible a detailed assessment of their value for language learning. For example, looking at the members of the 'polyword' class, one finds a mixture of functional and structural types, and criteria such as 'short phrases' and 'no variability' (1992:38), which are too vague to be of descriptive use. Alexander (1984, 1987, 1989) uses the term 'fixed expression' for the whole range of phenomena and sub-divides expressions as follows: 1 1.1 1.2 1.3

Idioms Phrasal verbs 'Tournures' Irreversible binomials

2 Discourse-structuring devices 2.1 Greetings, formulae 2.2 Connectives, 'gambits' 3.1 Proverbs 3.2 Proverbial (metaphorical) idioms 4 Catchphrases 4.1 Clichés 4.2 Slogans 5

Quotations, allusions

Alexander provides a more explicit and detailed categorization of expressions than Nattinger and DeCarrico, classifying them according to structural and pragmatic criteria. The primary distinction is made between phrase-length (Category 1) and sentence-length (Categories 2-5) expressions, the latter being defined by their pragmatic function in communication: I have distinguished five broad categories of fixed expressions, ranging from the lexically oriented idioms and their many subcategories, through discourse-structuring devices, such as gambits and proverbs and proverbial idioms, to the more encyclopedia-oriented expressions such as catchphrases and quotations. (1984:128)

The category that fits least well into this account is the cliché, since this is neither a structural nor a pragmatic category. This is one of the more problematic labels in the field of phraseology, is often misused, and is given separate detailed treatment below. Alexander's is certainly a more systematic attempt than Nattinger and DeCarrico's to make principled distinctions between classes of word combinations, though there are limitations to the scheme. One could question the use of 'fixed' on the grounds that the fixedness of many recurrent combinations is very variable and this feature cuts across the categories in his scheme. Some may be quite immutable, such as the 'irreversible binomial' bag and baggage. Others (especially the classes of expression in Category 2: 'greetings', 'gambits', 'formulae' etc) permit some substitution of elements, as Pawley (1988) points out "many expressions can be varied to some extent in wording and even in structure without losing formulaic status" (2). Although in his 1987 paper Alexander acknowledges the categorizations of Cowie and Aisenstadt (which give great prominence to varying degrees of fixedness), this feature plays no part in his overall scheme. Any range of word combinations as broad as that considered by

9 Alexander must allow for relative fixedness and should consider that as one of the main criteria, in order to mark off at an early stage in the analysis the very large numbers of combinations that are entirely predictable and lacking in phraseological significance. Linguists working within or influenced by the Russian tradition of phraseology, with its more theoretical interest in classifying word combinations, have generally used relative fixedness as a primary distinguishing feature. Zgusta (1971), for example, uses 'combinations of words' as the superordinate term, and divides them initially into 'free combinations' and 'set combinations'. The former, though occurring frequently, have a meaning which "is absolutely derivable from the meaning of the single combined words" (140). A set combination, on the other hand, "has a lexical meaning as a whole" (143), and this latter category is in turn subdivided, by means of such procedures as substitution, addition and grammatical equivalence to a single word, into: • • •

multi-word lexical units; set/idiomatic expressions and set groups

Having distinguished between the 'set' and the 'free', Zgusta makes a secondary distinction on the basis of syntactic function. Multi-word lexical units and set or idiomatic expressions function as grammatical classes, such as nouns, verbs or adjectives, while set groups "are not single lexical units" (153), and function pragmatically as proverbs, sayings, dicta and quotations. They are included in the category of 'set combinations', however, because they resist substitution of their constituent parts and are thus not free. It is worth noting here that Arnold (1986) suggests that set groups of this kind (proverbs, sayings, familiar quotations and clichés) do not fall within the realm of phraseology, being independent units of communication and not part of the regular system of language, except when they are abbreviated and become set expressions. For example the proverb It's the last straw that breaks the camel's back is of interest in being the origin of the expression the last straw (cf Gläser's 'transitional area' below). Thirdly, Zgusta differentiates idiomatic expressions from multi-word lexical units on the basis of semantic transparency: "the real idiomatic expressions seem always to have figurative meanings" (147), he points out, while the meaning of a multi-word lexical unit is 'direct' (ie transparent). The following diagram attempts to summarize Zgusta's classification of word combinations:

combinations of words free combinations

multi-word

set/idiomatic

lexical units

expressions

set groups

10 Zgusta introduces a feature essential to all phraseological analysis: the gradation between one category and another. He avoids claiming that idiomatic expressions are a sub-set of multiword lexical units or a separate category on their own, noting that "some of these set expressions verge on multi-word lexical units with a direct meaning [...] [others] seem to verge on the set group of words" (ibid). Elsewhere he states that "It is impossible to establish a sharp boundary between free combinations and set ones. It can be shown that there are different degrees of 'setness', or different degrees of restrictions" (154-5). The recognition of the gradation between categories will be seen later in this chapter as crucial to any description of composite units. While Zgusta is non-committal as to the place of idiomatic expressions in relation to both non-idiomatic multi-word lexical units and sentence-length set groups, Gläser (1988) offers a scheme that provides a solution. In common with other East European and Russian phraseologists (such as Kunin and Fleischer), she uses 'phraseology' and the superordinate term 'phraseological unit' (Zgusta's 'combination of words') in a broader sense than Arnold (1986), admitting to her categorization sentence-length units such as proverbs. The following diagram is a later version (forthcoming) of the scheme presented in Gläser 1988 (276):

The System of L G P Phraseology of Modern English L G P » Language for General Purposes, or Common Language

Legend I. Centr· Nomin étions (pertly covering terminology I II. Transition sree reductions of propositions III. Periphery Proposition· non-idioms I idioms

[Figure 1.1 'The System of LGP Phraseology of Modern English': Gläser (forthcoming)]

11 • The central position in her 'phraseological system' is occupied by 'word-like units': (those with a 'nominative function'), thus by combinations functioning as nouns (wet blanket, running water)·, adjectives (dressed to Mil, gainfully employed); verbs (rack one's brains, have a swim) and adverbs (by leaps and bounds, on the spot). • The transitional area consists of units which are reductions from sentence-length expressions and function as nominations: fragments of proverbs, proverbial sayings, irreversible binomials, stereotyped comparisons, literary allusions. • In the peripheral area are those expressions with a 'prepositional function, ie sentencelength units such as proverbs, truisms, routine formulas, slogans, maxims and quotations. Gläser's main aim is a taxonomy of idiomatic expressions arranged according to degrees of semantic opacity, but with a primary tri-partite division based on the syntactic or pragmatic function of phraseological units. While Zgusta distinguishes between degrees of transparency and opacity before making syntactic distinctions, Gläser's treatment seems to provide a more satisfactory procedure for the precise identification of phraseological categories, since the semantic criterion of idiomaticity (in reality a complex of inter-related criteria) can more reliably be applied once the focus of analysis has been narrowed to a defined syntactic category. A contrasting approach can be seen in Cowie (1983), in the introduction to a dictionary of idioms. This reverses the ordering of these semantic and functional criteria, making a primary distinction between 'idiomatic' and 'non-idiomatic' expressions. A structural division is made between phrase and clause idioms on the one hand and sentence idioms on the other (similar to Gläser's distinction between nominations and propositions), with the term 'idiomatic' being applied in a very broad sense to both categories (for the publishers' purposes of appealing to a non-native speaker readership). Attempting to cover so wide a band of the total spectrum of word combinations seems to weaken the usefulness of the term In a generally clearer later treatment, Cowie (1988) divides 'word combinations' (Gläser's 'phraseological units') initially into two main categories: those with a discourse function, called 'functional expressions' ('propositions'), which are "pragmatically specialized ... as greetings, enquiries, invitations etc" (132-3) and, secondly, 'composites' ('nominations'), which have a syntactic function and are "semantically specialized or idiomatic". While the former may be complete sentences or grammatically incomplete, the latter are "constituents of sentences (as objects, complements, adjuncts, and so on)" (134). With regard to semantic specialization and structural stability combinations in both categories are variable, but the primary division concerns their linguistic functions (pragmatic vs syntactic). The framework sought for the present study aims to facilitate the analysis of a variety of written discourse, and a preliminary categorization based on the function of the word combinations under examination would seem preferable to one which required initial semantic distinctions between, for example, idioms and non-idioms. The analysis of the relative fixedness of an expression requires the application of multiple criteria that depend on prior syntactic description. It is, therefore, necessary to make a primary distinction among word combinations between functional expressions on the one hand and composite units on the other, recognizing that each category includes both idiomatic and non-idiomatic expressions:

12

functional expressions

non-idiomatic

idiomatic

composite units

non-idiomatic

idiomatic

The category 'functional expressions' relates to Zgusta's 'set groups' and Gläser's 'propositions', including all the many specific types of discourse or pragmatic units mentioned by her. The category 'composite units' relates to Gläser's 'nominations', Cowie's 'composites' (1981b, 1988) and Zgusta's 'multi-word lexical units' and 'set expressions'. These units, therefore, are grammatical constituents of sentences, and, as we shall see, require further extensive grammatical and phraseological sub-division. This second category is also understood to include Gläser's 'transitional' area, since these units, which are grammatically integrated into sentence structure, will be treated as syntactic units and subject to the same léxico-semantic restrictions as her nominations. 1.2 Clichés The category 'cliché' was identified above as an anomaly in Alexander's scheme and warrants separate treatment for two reasons. Firstly, the term is in common use in linguistics. It is included in the classifications of both Nattinger (1980), as 'situational utterances', and Alexander (1984, 1987), linked with catchphrases and slogans, and mentioned by Arnold and Zgusta. The word cliché is also frequently used in everyday speech, though, unlike proverbs, catchphrases and slogans, it is generally very ill-defined. Secondly, it is acknowledged that a study stressing the prefabricated nature of language must at the same time emphasize that familiarity and fixedness are not incompatible with creativity and do not in themselves result in clichés. In considering, first, the meaning of the word, there appears to be much confusion between its use as a label indicating poor style and its use to refer to a category of linguistic expressions. This lack of precision can be seen in LuelsdorfFs study: [phraseology studies] phrases, clauses and sentences reproduced in their entirety [...] Such turns of speech include quotations, proverbs, idioms and clichés. (1981:1) [clichés are] phrases, sentences and clauses, which, through very frequent occurrence, have become hackneyed and trite. If frequently reproduced, idioms and quotations may become clichés, (ibid)

Here the term cliché is used both as a formal and a stylistic category. Clichés are presented firstly as instances of 'fixed turns of speech' along with, though separate from, idioms and proverbs, and secondly as idioms and proverbs themselves when they are overused. Turning to its stylistic application, there is almost unanimous agreement that the term can only be used pejoratively, though Apresyan et al (1969) use it in the alternative sense of familiar conventional expression: "the idea is to choose the most common clichés of Modern Russian" (19). Most writers place great emphasis on the stylistic impoverishment which results from such language use: for example, Arnold writes: "Empty and worn-out but pompous

13 phrases often become mere verbiage used as poor compensation for a lack of thought or precision" (1986:181). Although epithets such as 'wom-out', 'hackneyed' and 'trite' abound in the accounts of linguists, there is little attempt to define in linguistic terms what they mean. There is an assumption that native speakers will intuitively recognize the poor style resulting from a certain category of expression. Luelsdorff is one of the most vehement in his condemnation, though his study stands out as a serious attempt to describe the phenomenon linguistically. He associates clichéd style with the over-use of expressions and, in failing to analyse what 'overuse' means, makes the mistake of inteipreting it as conventionality: the native speaker, confronted with two or more expressions for the same content, selects the one which is anticipated with a lesser degree of probability by the listener. (1981:1)

Where the careful speaker and scrupulous writer consciously reject the use of cliché in preference to more creative types of utterance, the proverbial "man-in-the-street" rejects creative utterances in preference to clichés. It has been suggested that this latter behaviour is due now to mental lethargy, now to the feeling that clichés are both apt and smart. (2) He claims that on occasions even 'sophisticated' speakers will resort to the cliché: for instance, "politicians when addressing great audiences, on the majority of whose members subtlety and style would be wasted" (ibid). Luelsdorff, in his dismissal of the familiar, contradicts the evidence from psycholinguist ics that confirms the necessary role that conventional language plays in natural language processing, ignores the prevalence of creative manipulation of set phrases and seems unaware of the work of numerous scholars on conversational routines, speech formulas etc. (e.g. Coulmas 1979, Ferguson 1976, Galperin 1977, Moore and Carling 1988, Rank 1984). Many of these also point out the communicative necessity of prefabricated language: "routines, set phrases, clichés are not invariable, nor are they dispensable. We need them" (Moore and Carling 1988:72). Social harmony itself depends on the conventional: what we value most in language - creativity, expressiveness [...] - allows us to succeed less well in having others understand us than the largely prefabricated phrases we use to say almost the same thing over and over again. Paradoxically, language is at its best when it matters least; at its worst when it matters most, (ibid: 71)

There is even a danger in attempting to produce novel locutions on occasions when creativity and good style are not required or appreciated: "determine to avoid clichés at all costs and you are almost certain to be led into gobbledygook" (Galperin 1977:178). In reality it is impossible to identify clichés by means of any set of criteria. Features of the linguistic and social context must be examined: The linguistic scholar must be equipped with methods of stylistic analysis to ascertain the writer's aim, the situation in which the communication takes place and possibly the impact on the reader, to decide whether or not a phrase is a cliche or "the right word in the right place". (Galperin ibid: 180)

Cliché is the result of an expression which once had some stylistic force as, perhaps, a living metaphor, losing its force through over-use, though being repeatedly used as if it still had the effect of novelty. The conclusion to be drawn is that clichés are not a structural category, nor a

14 phraseological type. The label is used as a judgement on the contextual appropriateness of a word combination, which may belong to any of the categories discussed above.2 1.3 Composite units Having surveyed the whole range of word combinations, the focus of the study will now be sharpened by considering in more detail one part of the spectrum: composite units (examples 1-5 in §1.0). The reason for this focus relates to the problems faced by advanced learners of English, writing in a particular (academic) register, one of the main concerns of this study. Much of the emphasis of teaching for this purpose centres on such higher-level features of discourse as cohesion and coherence, where the most relevant categories of word combinations might be functional expressions such as discourse-structuring devices, gambits and formulae of various kinds. However, experience suggests that many of the difficulties learners face in language production occur at clause level, where the highest priority should be given to those categories of word combinations with a referential or nominative function: ie composite units. Within the category of composite units, the main focus of the Western linguistic tradition has been on idioms, though it has been shown in a number of the models presented above that those lexicologists with an understanding of the Russian tradition recognize that idiomatic expressions are but a small part of the phraseological spectrum. It is the aim of the remainder of this chapter to review studies of idioms before examining alternative perspectives on composite units which reveal a large and complex area that has not received sufficient attention. 1.4 Idioms It is useful first to consider in some detail the background to the present use of the term 'idiom'. The justification for this detailed treatment is twofold. Firstly, of all the terms employed in the study of word combinations, 'idiom' is probably the most familiar to laypeople and linguists, who might find themselves largely in agreement over the identification of an idiom. However, linguists have also expended considerable energy in attempting to understand how idioms fit into the language system, implying that of all lexical complexes they are the most linguistically significant. The data presented in this study will suggest that this is not in fact the case; that non-idiomatic composite units are more numerous and their description more complex. However, a misplaced emphasis on idiomaticity has dominated discussion of composite units as a whole, and a survey of the various theoretical viewpoints on idioms is needed in order to produce a clearer understanding of the role of composites in linguistic production. It will become clear that in any close investigation of idiomaticity it is impossible to exclude the rest of the phraseological spectrum from the discussion. Secondly, it is desirable for the purposes of this study to understand how composite units are processed psycholinguistically (see Chapter Two). However, the category of composite units most commonly recognized by psychologists in studies of such processes is idioms. In order therefore to understand how other categories of composite units are processed, it is necessary to make inferences from the research carried out on idiomatic expressions. Furthermore, researchers are usually unaware that the working definition of idiom they use in

2

The importance of the role of context in producing clichés is supported by the fact that technical terms can never become clichés, since their meaning is stable and associated with a predictable set of contexts

15

such studies is often rather uncritically adopted from linguists who approach the phenomenon from a particular theoretical standpoint. In order to interpret their findings it is therefore desirable first to survey the range of linguistic perspectives on the term. Idioms in English have received the greatest specific attention from Chafe 1968, Fraser 1970, Hockett 1958, Katz and Postal 1963, Makkai 1972 and Weinreich 1969 in the US, and from Cowie (1975, in Cowie and Mackin), Cowie 1981b, Cowie et al 1983 and Fernando and Flavell 1981 in Britain. The term has been given a variety of meanings by these writers, who have variously stressed such characteristics as semantic opacity (for example, how does kick the bucket come to mean 'die'?), the possibility of an alternative literal interpretation (whether kick the bucket could refer to a literal blow with the foot to a water container), and structural immutability (neither strike the bucket, kick the pail nor kick the buckets carry the same idiomatic meaning). Such criteria have been used to distinguish between two or more degrees of idiomaticity, in particular between 'pure idioms' and 'figurative idioms'. In spite of considerable scholarly disagreement, the term 'idiom' still has descriptive value and its use has not been seriously challenged, perhaps because it has such a firm foundation in non-technical usage, which accords in certain respects with more technical definitions. 1.4.1 Non-technical definitions Looking first at three non-specialist dictionary treatments of idiom, their emphasis on the socio-cultural distinctiveness of such items is apparent: CED 2nd edition 1986 2 linguistic usage that is grammatical and natural to native speakers of a language 3 the characteristic vocabulary or usage of a specific human group or subject

LDOCE 2nd edition 1987 2 the way of expression typical of a person or a group in their use of language O E D 2nd edition 1989 1 a The form of speech peculiar to a people or country; own language or tongue. (1588) b (in narrower sense) That variety of a language which is peculiar to a limited district or class of people; dialect. 2 The specific character, property, or genius of any language; the manner of expression which is natural or peculiar to it. (1598) 3 a A form of expression, grammatical construction, phrase etc, peculiar to a language; a peculiarity of phraseology approved by the usage of a language, [... ]( 1628)

Fowler's Modern English Usage (1965) is also representative of the non-scientific approach. For him 'idiom' is customary phrasing sanctioned by usage: Idiom is conservative, standing in the ancient ways, insisting that its property is sacrosanct, permitting no jot or tittle of alteration in the shape of its phrases. (79)

In its conservatism it is opposed by the force of 'analogy', which is progressive, bent on extending liberty, demanding better reasons than use and wont for respecting the 3

established [... ] for ever successful in recasting some piece of the cast iron . (ibid)

3

This distinction corresponds to the 'idiom principle' vs 'the open-choice principle' introduced by Sinclair 1987a.

16 The primary senses given by both CED and LDOCE, and one of the secondary senses given by OED, are closer to the prevailing technical emphasis on an idiom's semantic and structural characteristics: CED 1 a group of words whose meaning cannot be predicted from the meanings of the constituent words

LDOCE 1 a phrase which means something different from the meanings of the separate words from which it is formed.

OED 3 a [...], often having a signification other than its grammatical or logical one.

Linguists in the first half of this century took little notice of idioms, and in the major works of some leading American scholars (for example, Bloomfield 1933, Harris 1951 and Sapir 1921) there is no mention of idioms at all. In Europe there is little evidence of much greater interest: the word 'idiome' is used by Saussure (1916/1955), though it is not given technical status and is closely related to the primary sense in OED 1 above: Le terme d'idiome désigne fort justement la language comme reflétant les traits propres d'une communauté (le grec 'idioma' avait déjà le sens de 'coutume spéciale'). (261)

Jespersen (1922) has a section within a chapter on Grammar headed 'Prepositions and Idioms', two phenomena presenting particular problems to learners of English. However, in the text itself he makes no mention of idioms, and one is left to infer that the following passages refer to idioms: turns of speech which are utterly opposed to the spirit of the language, and which are in the main of the same kind as those which foreigners are apt to fall into

and, quoting Herman Moller, countless chicaneries due to the tyrannical and capricious usage, whose tricks there is no calculating. (139)

There is a hint here of the opaque nature of idioms if we take 'calculate' to mean 'attempt to analyse', but there is insufficient information to lead us to suppose that Jespersen thought of idioms as anything other than linguistically peripheral.4 Sweet (1899/1964), however, uses the term in a sense close to its current linguistic usage: [at this stage] idioms will be learned [...] from a phraseology in which the idioms will be classed under psychological categories (120). Most dictionaries are not at all liberal in giving space to idioms and phrases. (145)

though he concurrently uses 'idiomatic' in the non-technical sense when he talks of 'reading idiomatic texts'.

4

An interesting additional example of the pre-scientific use of idiom is found in the name of an artificial international language: Idiom Neutral, founded by W Rosenberger in 1903 and designed for maximum international accessibility, presumably by extinguishing anything 'idiomatic', ie culture-specific.

17

1.4.2 Structuralism Hockett's (1958) is one of the first serious linguistic analyses of idioms. His chief interests are in revealing the processes behind the creation of idioms and their assimilation into the structural description of languages (with its then dominant emphasis on morphology). Idioms result from a new utterance (a 'nonce-form' constituted from 'familiar material by familiar patterns') being produced when there is something more or less unusual either about the structure of the [...] nonce-form, or about the attendant circumstances, or both, which renders the form memorable. (304)

This conception of the class fits in with the diachronic stages outlined above, though Hockett provides no criteria for the inclusion of his examples in the category. Consequently, large areas of the lexicon are potentially idiomatic, including pronouns used in anaphoric reference (he, she), numbers, proper names (eg Sitting Bull) and abbreviations {plane for airplane). These can all be regarded as varieties of verbal substitute referring to the extra-linguistic context, and on the occasion of any particular utterance that reference will be unpredictable, 'new' and therefore idiomatic: "Anaphoric substitutes are almost by definition forms which tum up in each new context with a new idiomatic value" (310). Indeed, the consequence of Hockett's morphemic analysis is if we are to be consistent, we are forced to grant every morpheme idiomatic status, since a morpheme has no structure from which its meaning could be deduced. (172)

Taking the definition to this logical conclusion seems to produce results that are so counterintuitive that the term becomes meaningless and a valueless tool in linguistic description. Later approaches have considered an idiom to be a unit larger than a morpheme. However one views Hockett's treatment, it illustrates the difficulty of reconciling formal and semantic criteria in the analysis of idiomaticity. 1.4.3 Transformational Grammar Linguists identified with the Transformational Grammar (TG) school of linguistics (eg Chafe 1968, Fraser 1970, Katz and Postal 1963, Weinreich 1969) have regarded idioms primarily as a challenge for generative grammar. On the one hand, idioms are semantically irregular, not analysable by normal lexicogrammatical rules and therefore belong in the lexicon. On the other hand, they are syntactic units, conforming to a variety of regular syntactic combinatorial rules, in which case, by placing them in the lexicon, we introduce a great deal of redundant information into the grammar. For Katz and Postal the defining feature of an idiom is that "its full meaning [...] is not a compositional function of the meanings of the idiom's elementary grammatical parts" (1963:275). 'Lexical idioms', on the one hand, consist of compound nouns, verbs and adjectives with two or more morphemes, such as tele+phone, and can be included in the lexicon, since they can be "directly assigned readings [from the dictionary of the semantic component] that represent their senses" (276). These would also be included in Hockett's category of idioms. 'Phrasal idioms', on the other hand, cannot be similarly dealt with, since the syntactic component of the grammar already generates the literal counterpart of the idiomatic stretch compositionally.

18 at least the [...] idioms whose occurrences also have compositional meanings must receive the ordinary syntactic structure assigned to occurrences of the stretches with compositional meanings. (277)

Katz and Postal's rationale is founded on the belief that all phrasal idioms such as kick the bucket have a 'compositional meaning' in addition to their idiomatic meaning. However, the relationship between the two meanings (if one exists at all) is complex, and cannot be understood without considering the historical process of idiom formation (this will be discussed in more detail later). In other words, the 'motivation' (or analysability) of idioms is a matter of degree. Further, although kick the bucket could be used by a speaker in its literal meaning, in reality it hardly ever would. Once an idiomatic sense becomes established (or 'institutionalized'), it has a strong tendency to dominate over the literal interpretation or to exclude it, and only for the purposes of irony on the speaker's part or as a result of obtuseness (or foreignness) on the hearer's would the literal interpretation be intended or understood. The theoretical linguistic analysis of idioms necessarily ignores their communicative value, though with such culturally loaded items this is a serious omission. Knowledge of the existence of a literal interpretation of an idiom is part of the native speaker's competence. It is available for conscious exploitation and has enormous stylistic value, especially in the creative language use of journalism, advertising and literature. However one cannot insist on a sharp separation between idiomatic and literal meanings and there is no need for a deterministic mechanism for relating them Chafe follows Katz and Postal in treating idioms as 'anomalous', but emphasizes thenfrequency and therefore the impossibility of relegating them to the status of curios: The importance of idioms [...] cannot be doubted. Their ubiquity makes them anything but a marginal phenomenon, and surely a linguistic theory has an obligation to explain them in a natural way. (1968: 111)

He states four ways in which idioms display peculiarities in their deep structure: 1. The meaning of the whole is not a product of the parts: "The meaning of an idiom is comparable to the meaning of a single lexical item". 2. Most idioms are 'deficient' in the transformations that can be applied to their deep structures. 3. Some idioms are not syntactically well-formed, therefore could not be generated by the grammar. 4. The literal deep structure is not textually as common as its idiomatic counterpart. For him Katz and Postal's proposals for dealing with idioms are inadequate in failing to account for these four anomalies. He postulates an historical process which he calls 'idiomatization', producing a 'semantic split': After such a split has taken place the original [literal] semantic arrangement is typically still present in the language, but in addition a new semantic unit has been formed by shrinkage of the composite meaning into a new unitary meaning. [...] The old 'literal' meaning did not thereby disappear, but remained in the language alongside the new unit, or 'idiom'. (120)

This process allows new meanings to be introduced into the language by making use of already existing linguistic forms (see Hockett on new utterances made from 'familiar material by familiar patterns', and what Weinreich calls 'doubling-up').

19 Looking at Chafe's anomalies in reverse order, we have already seen, firstly, that the relationships between homonymous literal and idiomatic interpretations are complex and impossible to reduce to a simple formula, though Chafe is surely right in saying that the idiomatic sense is more common than the literal. Secondly, Chafe expresses concern about a theory unable to accommodate asyntactic idioms (such as by far and away, by and large, blow sb to kingdom come). These are dismissed by Katz and Postal ("there will be no occurrences of syntactically deviant idioms available for the normal process of semantic interpretation" (281)), while Weinreich sensibly suggests that what he calls "isolated oddities [...] account for only a small fraction of the phraseological resources of a language" (1969:46). Rather than trying to devise a uniform theory that will include such oddities, it is possible to see in them extreme examples of fossilization and immutability, processes which affect to varying degrees all the expressions we call composites. Thirdly, 'transformational deficiency' applies to individual idioms (and not only to idioms) haphazardly, and one cannot draw general conclusions from it. Finally, one comes to Chafe's first 'anomaly', the equivalence in meaning of an idiomatic expression to that of a single word (ie kick the bucket meaning 'die'). This is clearly a convenient belief for TG linguists in their attempt to integrate idioms into the mechanics of their grammar, though it is only true of a proportion of idioms (what is the one-word equivalent of spill the beans'?). Even for those of which it is true (particularly phrasal verbs, where stylistically distinct latinate alternatives often exist: eg put off meaning 'postpone'), the existence of the one-word equivalent makes no difference to the analysis of the idiomatic composite, and can be accounted for within the much broader phenomenon of lexicalization (see Bauer 1983, Cruse 1986 and Pawley 1985a). Fraser (1970) is also concerned with how the meanings of idioms can be represented in deep structure, but he additionally focuses on the "recalcitrance of idioms to undergo particular syntactic transformations" and establishes six levels of 'frozenness' according to which of an ordered set of transformations an idiom permits: L6 L5 L4 L3 L2 LI LO

- Unrestricted - Reconstitution - Extraction - Permutation - Insertion - Adjunction - Completely frozen

Each category involves more than one transformation. For example, Extraction is represented by the particle movement rule (look up the information —> look the information up), the passive transformation (pass the buck —> the buck has been passed too often around here) or preposing of prepositions (not touch sth with a JO foot pole —» With a 10 foot pole I wouldn't touch that job). However, since Fraser does not control the structural patterns (ie constituent structure) of the idioms he uses as his material (using phrase, clause and sentence idioms unsystematically), his categorization does not provide a satisfactory basis for generalizations about the character of idioms. His model is nonetheless appealing to psycholinguists such as Swinney and Cutler (1979) and Cutler (1982), since it provides a simple framework for experimental studies, though Gibbs (1986a) rejects it empirically (see Chapter Two). Although Weinreich (1969) follows Katz and Postal in regarding idioms as having simultaneous alternative interpretations and as being potentially ambiguous, he can also be seen as working within the tradition of Russian phraseology (see §1.4.5 below), in considering idioms in the wider context of phraseological units and laying emphasis on the role of context

20 in restricting the selection of their subsenses. Crucially, he sees that the context which determines the selection of one particular subsense (and blocks other interpretations) may be 'morphemic' (rather than syntactic or semantic): for example, the subsense of blind in blind date would not be selected in the context of any other synonym for date (eg appointment). The selection is therefore not semantic, but depends on the specific item date. What Weinreich calls morphemic restrictions, other linguists might call lexical or collocational, but the point is that Weinreich differs from other scholars in the US tradition in giving considerable weight to the lexical meaning of phraseological components: "sometimes the selection of a subsense depends not on any semantic fact in the context, but on an individual morpheme being present" (41). However, while such an analysis of the relationship between lexical items is clearly relevant to the description of non-idiomatic phraseological units (see the discussion of 'collocation' in §1.5), whose component items have identifiable, independent senses, it is surely not applicable to idioms. It is generally agreed that the latter do not have elements with analysable senses. Weinreich's use of the term 'collocation' and his discussion of mutual restrictions on the selection of subsenses bring him closer to the ideas of European lexicologists discussed below. Weinreich is also distinguished from most TG linguists in his self-confessed "diversified treatment for different types of expression" (70). He contributes to the crucial debate about what is idiomatic in language and insists on the limited application of that term to a central core of linguistic phenomena rather than to a much broader range of diverse items. He also emphasizes the essential arbitrariness of this area of language (which can be related to its conventionality), an aspect stressed by many later linguists: "Why should eat crow signify the acceptance of what one has fought against, rather than some other nauseating act such as eating dog or smelling rotten eggsT\76). In conclusion, he says "I feel that the relation between idiomatic and literal meanings is so unsystematic as to deserve no place in the theory"(76), a feeling with far-reaching implications, since, for him, "the majority of words occurring in a text can be involved in idioms"(60). 1.4.4 Other Western views of idioms Makkai (1972) reacts strongly against the contemporary mainstream US approach to idioms, (ie the emphasis on their transformational deficiency), reflecting his espousal of Stratificational Grammar as a rival model to TG. He makes a major distinction between idioms of 'encoding' and those of 'decoding', stressing the idiom as a problem for language users rather than for linguists, with obvious relevance for teachers and learners of English as a second language (see Chapter Five below on the use of these terms in pedagogical lexicography). Idioms of encoding (often collocations of verb + preposition or adjective + noun) are 'phraseological peculiarities' or 'phraseological idioms', such as drive at 70 mph, where the choice of preposition, being somewhat arbitrary, presents problems to the speaker. Idioms of decoding, for example, hot potato, are 'semantic idioms', which are difficult for the hearer to interpret. All idioms of decoding also create problems of encoding, but the converse is not necessarily true. This is a useful distinction to make, based as it is on consideration of natural language use, though it presents a rather limited view of the structure of idioms. Makkai proposes two areas of idiomaticity, related to strata in the Stratificational model: • 'lexemic idioms', which include phrasal verbs, irreversible binomials and 'tournure idioms'.5

3

The term 'tournure' appears to be related to 'turn of phrase' and to refer to the stylistic properties of idioms; Alexander seems to be one of the few other writers to use it.

21 • 'sememic idioms', which are mainly institutionalized speech formulae with functional labels such as 'greeting', 'politeness', 'proposals encoded as questions'. This distinction seems to parallel closely the division made earlier in this study between 'composite units' and 'functional expressions'. Makkai, however, continues and deepens the debate over the relationship between idiomatic and literal meanings. He sets up a contrast between idiomaticity and homonymy. Homonymy can lead to misinformation since it presents two (or more) equally meaningful decodings, one of which is wrong in the context (eg She bears children could equally mean 'carries' or 'gives birth to'). Idiomaticity, on the other hand, leads to disinformation, where there is potentially a logical but erroneous literal decoding. Misinformation could be seen in the following newspaper report: bags of people entering government offices are searched. An example of potential disinformation is In those days it was possible to go out for the evening without spending a penny (an elderly woman reminiscing on radio about her youth). In the first example, the style of the report strongly supports the more formal, literal meaning ('the bags belonging to the people' against the informal 'lots of people'), so the two interpretations cannot be regarded as having equal weight, and the latter might not occur to many readers of the report. In the second example, contrary to what Makkai claims, the context makes the literal meaning ('spend a small amount of money') much more likely than the idiomatic ('go to the lavatory'). Consequently, we must again conclude that there is no systematic relationship between an idiomatic meaning and any literal interpretation that might be available. Finally, Fernando and Flavell (1981) in a comprehensive general survey of the term, reject Makkai's distinction between homonymy and idiomaticity (though agreeing with his dismissal of the TG approach), claiming that the one follows from the other: the disinformation potential of idioms arises [...] from the fact of their possessing homonymous literal counterparts. (32)

They go further and exclude from the category of'pure idioms' all those constructions which violate truth conditions and, therefore, have no literal counterparts, as well as those which are phraseologically peculiar. (33)

By the first criterion rain cats and dogs and jump down someone's throat are excluded; by the second to kingdom come and by and large. The four criteria necessary for their definition of a pure idiom are: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Its meaning is not the result of the compositional function of its constituents. It has a literal homonymous counterpart. It is a syntactic unit. It is institutionalized

The first criterion is uncontroversial and forms part of most linguistic and non-specialist definitions. The second has already been discussed at various points in the previous sections and rejected as a condition. The third has been presented as an essential feature of all composite units at the centre of this study. The final criterion is used by Fernando and Flavell to weed out nonce forms which never gain currency in a speech community, and could be regarded as a sine qua non of the whole discussion.

22

Fernando and Flavell, in rejecting idioms which have no literal counterpart ignore the historical processes by which idioms are formed. In origin all idioms had a compositional meaning and a recognized syntactic structure. The literal expression became increasingly specialized either in the figurative meaning of one of its elements (as in so-called 'restricted collocations') or in the metaphorical use of the whole. Over time the figurative interpretation tends to displace the literal, the original referent may lose its cultural importance or even disappear, and as a result a literal interpretation may become impossible and disappear from the language. As the relationship between form and meaning becomes increasingly fossilized and conventional, the syntactic properties of the unit may in addition be subject to distortion. Seen from this diachronic point of view, the most centrally idiomatic expressions are those without literal counterparts and with syntactic peculiarities, the very items excluded by Fernando and Flavell from the class of 'pure idioms'. 1.4.5 The Russian perspective on idioms The historical perspective on the formation of idioms highlights the point that their semantically unitary status is the culmination of a process that applies to a much broader spectrum of composite units. By focusing so narrowly on those items that fulfil certain strict criteria (and are thus easier to describe), a very large area of the phraseological spectrum has been relatively neglected. In contrast, linguists in the Russian tradition (represented, in English, by Akhmanova 1974, Arnold 1986, Ginzburg et al 1979, in Russia, and by Weinreich 1969 in the USA), have been interested in determining the degree of rigidity of a range of 'set expressions', of which idioms are just one category. The model preferred by Amosova 1963, Vinogradov 1977 and others for describing the relationship between these items is a continuum. At one extreme are idioms ('phraseological fusions' (in Vinogradov's terminology)), the most rigid, and at the other are 'free phrases', outside the scope of 'set expressions' altogether. The criteria for establishing where a particular expression lies on the continuum include the substitutability of a component and the possibility of translation, and the description therefore does not rely solely on the semantic motivation of the whole (ie whether the meaning of the whole can be derived from the meanings of the parts). It will be seen later that the criterion of substitutability in particular is central to the establishment of the analytical framework used in this study. A full discussion of its application to the classification of composite units will be provided in § 1.7. The following represents Arnold's version of Vinogradov's phraseological taxonomy, representative of the Russian approach: word groups

free phrases

semi-fixed combinations

combinations

unities

set expressions

fusions

By means of the above criteria Vinogradov (as reported by Arnold) proposes three categories of phraseological units:

23 • phraseological fusions (most rigid, with the least substitution and unmotivated; corresponding to pure idioms) eg tit for tat • phraseological unities eg stick to one's guns • phraseological combinations (least rigid, with the most substitution and motivated; corresponding to restricted collocations) eg meet the demand This classification clearly resembles that proposed by Zgusta (1971), presented in §1.1. Vinogradov's 'set expressions' relate to Zgusta's 'set combinations', among which both writers see degrees of 'setness' or restriction. (The chief difference in Zgusta's scheme is the inclusion within 'combinations of words' of functional expressions, or 'set groups', which Vinogradov excludes from 'word groups'.) There is general agreement in Russian phraseology over the distinction between phraseological fusions and phraseological unities (which can be equated quite precisely with 'pure' and 'figurative' idioms as those terms are used in the Western European literature), since the semantic criteria for their identification are relatively clear-cut. Although, as we shall see in the discussion of the Russian perspective on collocation, there is scope for debate over the details of Vinogradov's taxonomy, this approach has made two significant contributions to phraseology. Firstly, the term 'phraseological' usefully indicates a property that expressions have to varying degrees, and, secondly, the continuum model has great descriptive value and perhaps psychological validity in representing the degrees of stability with which expressions are stored in the mental lexicon. 1.4.6 The classification of figurative and pure idioms For the purposes of completeness this study will present an integrated framework for the analysis of all composite units (see the summary in §1.8), which will be applied in the phraseological description of the texts examined in the later chapters. The principal criteria to be employed for the analysis will be discussed in §1.7 below. However, it is convenient to discuss separately, and briefly, at this point the criteria to be used for the identification and classification of idioms, which are directly derived from the features mentioned above: semantic unity and motivation. 1.4.6.1 The semantic unity of idioms Semantic unity is a fundamental feature of composites at the idiomatic end of the continuum. Both pure and figurative idioms (the terms adopted here from Cowie 1983 as equivalents of phraseological 'fusions' and 'unities') are regarded as semantically unitary, and it will be seen that it is chiefly this that distinguishes collocations from idioms. However, this criterion can be seen to apply in different degrees to figurative and pure idioms. The meaning of the pure idiom kick the bucket is 'die', and cannot be discovered from the combination of the meanings 'kick' + 'bucket'. Kick the bucket is therefore semantically unanalysable by the language user and indivisible. A figurative idiom such as change gear is also semantically unitary, since its sense of'alter one's approach' is associated with the whole expression and neither component makes an individual contribution. However, additional associations with the individual elements may be activated in the speaker's or hearer's mind (in this case, perhaps because change has a clear

24 semantic link with the sense 'alter'), which make the unity looser. This semantic distinction between figurative and pure idioms can be understood in terms of motivation. 1.4.6.2 Motivation The term 'motivation' (recognized by Russian lexicologists such as Arnold, Ginzburg and Vinogradov; §1.4.5 above) indicates the ability of the reader/hearer to recognize the origin of an idiom, and it is this criterion that distinguishes figurative from pure idioms. While figurative idioms are clearly motivated (for example, one can easily identify the footballing origin of the idiom move the goalposts), pure idioms such as shoot the breeze are unmotivated. It is important to remember, however, that this criterion is applied relatively, since individuals will have different perceptions of an idiom's motivation, depending, perhaps, on age and knowledge of the world. For example, for some the word gaff m blow the gaff might activate a connection with 'blasphemous or ribald speech' or set off a nautical association (meaning 'stick armed with an iron hook for landing large fish') making the expression semi-motivated, while for others it is completely unmotivated. Figurative idioms are in origin metaphorical expressions which have become stabilized units in the language system. The transparency of the composite, the extent to which it is motivated, depends on how easily the metaphorical connection with the original can be perceived. Whether the use of the idiom activates in the mind of the speaker/hearer the 'literal' frame of reference will be partly a personal variable. On hearing the exhortation The party must change gear in the run up to the election, some hearers would readily be able to call to mind the image of a car accelerating, while others may be more accustomed to associating the expression with contexts in which the human metaphor is intended. Many of these idioms are clearly associated with distinct cultural institutions, such as sport (open the bowling, move the goal posts)·, cars (change gear, do a U-turn)·, the railways (run out of steam, from the •wrong side of the tracks) or the military (mark time, close ranks). However, hearers will vary in both their linguistic awareness and their knowledge of the world, which means that the transparency of many of these highly culture-specific expressions is synchronically extremely variable. In addition, diachronic factors play a very important role. The original frame of reference may become obsolete, or may come from a literary reference no longer widely known. For example bury the hatchet, turn the tables on sb or kill the fatted calf have become increasingly unmotivated. As these composites become, in time, more divorced from their origins, they come closer to the status of pure idioms. Semantically, a pure idiom is quite opaque. The whole composite has become fossilized by repeated use in a speech community and it is impossible, as well as unnecessary, for the original figurative motivation of the expression to be actively present in the minds of the speakers/hearers. Continuing the model of a continuum, Cowie describes pure idioms as "historically [...] the end-point of a process by which word-combinations first establish themselves through constant re-use, then undergo figurative extension and finally petrify or congeal" (1983:xii). Over time a figurative idiom may become divorced from its metaphorical origins and become a fully-fledged idiom. One can discern a diachronic scale from the analysable figurative idiom such as do a U-turn or a narrow shave via expressions in which not all speakers will be aware of a literal antecedent as in stop the rot or bury the hatchet to the most moribund expressions such as kick the bucket or spill the beans. In some cases the fossilized nature of the expression has preserved a lexeme which has otherwise died out of the language: for example in high dudgeon or blow the gaff. Here the word dudgeon persists in the language by being protected by the unanalysed composite, and in turn assists in preventing the analysis of the idiom

25 From the perspective of this study, discussion of idioms is of chiefly theoretical importance. It raises issues that are relevant to the whole spectrum, even though idioms themselves do not play a large part in written language production. There are very many more composite units that are phraseologically significant, but outside the realm of idioms. The focus will now shift to the non-idiomatic segment of the central area of Gläser's diagram (§1.1), which will be discussed under the heading of'collocation'. 6 1.5 Collocation The approach outlined here originates in two different traditions: Firthian linguistics and Russian lexicology. From the first comes the notion of 'collocation'; from the second the systematic categorization of all set expressions. A third line of descent can be traced through Sweet, Palmer and Hornby, who, in the earlier part of this century, all recognized the problem that idioms and collocations posed for language learners. However, although they have had a great influence on the design of pedagogical dictionaries of English (which will be discussed in Chapter Five), none of them developed a detailed framework for the analysis of composites. The word 'collocation' has been used in connection with language (to mean 'cooccurrence') since at least 1751 ('the difference of harmony arising from the collocation of vowels and consonants' (OED)). It has also been used with reference to a writer's juxtaposition of linguistic elements: "All languages use greater freedom of collocation in poetry than in prose" (1873 OED). Palmer commented in 1933 that "In Linguistics it [the word 'collocation'] is already in use as a technical but conveniently vague term" (IRET:7), and gave it the following definition: A collocation is a succession of two or more words that must be learnt as an integral whole and not pieced together from its component parts. (ibid:title page)

reflecting the particular pedagogical orientation of his interest. Firth gave 'collocation' (and 'collocational level of description') a special status in his treatment of lexis, and in this sense (in relation to the study of English) it has largely remained confined to British linguistics (the principal exceptions among American linguists being Bolinger 1970, Fraser 1970 and Weinreich 1969). Collocations present a special challenge for linguistic description in having the following features: 1. generally, one element in a collocation has greater freedom of co-occurrence than the other in a given sense (eg the sense of the verb adopt in adopt a policy is limited to the context of a definable set of nouns (measure, scheme etc.), while the noun policy can cooccur with an almost indeterminate range of verbs: argue over, discuss, present, vote on etc.); 2. the relationship between the elements in a collocation is mostly unidirectional not bidirectional (we perceive the figurative sense of adopt from its co-occurrence with policy, not vice versa); and

6

There is disagreement about the relative size of the non-idiomatic segment. Gläser suggests that the nonidiomatic is the smaller part; Mel'cuk, on the other hand, claims that "collocations [non-idiomatic] contribute the absolute majority of set phrases [equivalent to non-free composite units]" (forthcoming^). See also Moon (1988) on the frequency of idioms in discourse.

26 3. it can be seen to have an internal grammatical structure that contributes to its meaning as a whole (eg adopt a policy can be analysed as a sequence of transitive verb + direct object). These features raise two issues central to the treatment of collocation: • What is the relationship between the grammatical and lexical features of collocations, or, more fundamentally, how are the grammar and the lexicon of a language related? • Within the lexicon, how can the semantic properties of an individual item be reconciled with its meanings in collocations? The first is clearly a matter of fundamental theoretical orientation. A sample of views indicates the breadth of the gulf between schools of thought: for Bloomfield the lexicon is "an appendix of the grammar, a list of basic irregularities" (1933:274); for Bolinger "the lexicon is central, [...] grammar is not something into which words are plugged but is rather a mechanism by which words are served." "[...] the significant fact is the subordinate role of grammar. The most important thing is to get the words in" (1970:79/81). Similar views can be found in Becker (1975:1) ("productive processes have the secondary role of adapting the old phrases to the new situation") and Mel'cuk (forthcoming), who claims that "the dictionary is the monarch; a grammar is a domestic help". From the perspective of this study, with great attention being paid to precise lexico-grammatical description, a balance needs to be struck between the two extremes. Neither grammar nor lexis needs to be treated as theoretically primary, and it will be demonstrated that a valid account of phraseological mechanisms emphasizes their interdependence. 1.5.1 Firth on collocation Firth attempts to resolve this question by separating grammar and lexis into two parallel 'levels' of description: descriptive linguistics "handles and states meaning by dispersing it in a range of techniques working at a series of levels" (1957a: 195). The two levels are related via the twin perspectives of the syntagm and the paradigm. Just as at the level of grammar relations between linguistic elements can be described both syntagmatically and paradigmatically, so lexical relations can be stated in terms of 'combination' and 'commutation'. This approach is represented by the following model using Halliday's terminology. The 'chain' (or syntagmatic) relationships can be seen in grammatical structure and lexical collocation, while paradigmatic 'choice' is correspondingly manifested in grammatical system and lexical set: chain

choice

grammar

structure

system

lexis

collocation

set

[From Carter 1987 after Halliday 1966] Firth seems to give greater weight to the syntagmatic axis or at least to keep the two axes of chain and choice separate:

27 Meaning by collocation is an abstraction at the syntagmatic level and is not directly concerned with the conceptual or idea approach to the meaning of words. One of the meanings of'night' is its collocability with 'dark'. [...] I propose to bring forward as a technical term, meaning by 'collocation', and to apply the test of 'collocability' (1957a: 194). Two views of the relationship between collocation and syntax can be identified by linguists following on from Firth's rather general theoretical statements: on the one hand, collocations are seen as quite independent from any grammatical structure that they might realize, and, on the other, they are viewed necessarily as realizations of specifiable syntactic structures. 1.5.2 The Neo-Firthians An important contribution to the debate is Halliday (1966), who focuses on the separation of lexis from grammar. He describes lexis as being within linguistic form, but not within grammar, lexical semantics as distinct from grammatical semantics and lexical patterns as different in kind from grammatical patterns. He suggests that, in the analysis of collocations, the particular syntactic relations between a pair of lexical items may be irrelevant: "The lexical item is not coextensive with the grammatical item" (153). The same collocation can be observed, for example, in categorically deny and a categorical denial, and, indeed, the two items which collocate need not even be in the same sentence.7 Additionally, Halliday suggests that lexis cannot be described in identical terms to those of grammar: the structure (syntagmatic) / system (paradigmatic) model must be modified. Grammatical structure consists of complex interrelations which are not purely sequential, whereas at the lexical level collocational structure is evidenced by linear co-occurrence and 'significant proximity'. Grammatical systems consist of a limited number of specifiable choices, while a lexical set is open-ended, with a membership which can only be stated in probabilistic terms. Grammatical units can be ordered in a hierarchy from morpheme to sentence, whereas "it does not seem useful to postulate such an ordered hierarchy for lexis" (1966:156). Firth's definition of'meaning by collocation', along with his example of dark night, is often quoted and used in support of an approach to collocation in which the co-occurrence of items is reciprocal (ie night and dark provide each other with the defining context to an equal degree) and a matter of probability and frequency. This has encouraged the rise of a movement in lexicology that attempts to describe collocational meaning by means of the computational, statistical analysis of large bodies of text (eg Sinclair 1991). The availability of large machinereadable natural language corpora has encouraged lexicologists and lexicographers to apply Firth's 'meaning by collocation' to the description of large parts of the vocabulary. This approach has developed into a widely adopted technique in lexical studies and will be discussed in detail in Chapter Three, when methods of collocational analysis will be considered and compared. Halliday, however, presents a more refined view of the relationship between the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes of the lexicon. Although the meanings of lexical items, in the semantics of sense relations, are stated independently of context in terms of synonymy, complementarity, hyponymy, etc (Lyons 1977), Halliday argues that these sense relations are not constant and are dependent on the syntagmatic relations that they enter into in the linguistic context. So, strong and powerful, superficially regarded as synonyms, stand in different relations to each other in a strong/powerful argument, a *strong/powerful car and

Elsewhere, however, Halliday admits a less complete separation of levels, there being descriptive statements that unite grammatical and lexical patterns in mutual dependence: it is "essential to examine collocational patterns in their grammatical environments" (1966:159).

28

strong/*powerful tea. By substituting one element in the collocation (ie argument, car, tea), a change is produced in the sense of the other, so that strong has different senses in strong argument and strong tea. Similarly, the antonym of soft is contextually determined by its noun collocate: soft/hard drugs, soft/loud voice, soft/sharp sand. This view of the role of context brings Halliday close to the Russian phraseologists discussed below. 1.5.3 Objections to the Firthian perspective A number of objections can be made to the approaches to collocational description outlined above. Firstly, 'meaning by collocation' seems to both simplify and overstate the case. There are certainly lexical items, or items in particular senses, that can best be described in terms of their collocabilities. This is most clearly true of 'delexical' verbs (or, rather, verbs used in delexical senses), such as have, take and make. Take seems to have very little generalizable, independent meaning in take advantage of sth, take account of sth, take care of sth and take the opportunity. In these cases it would be hard to substitute other noun collocates while retaining the sense of the verb, in which case the meaning of the verb in many instances cannot be truly described in isolation from its collocate. On the other hand, different senses of a polysemous item may vary greatly in the number and range of possible collocates which they allow (Cowie 1981b). Some, for example run in the sense of 'manage', may allow a wide range (business, theatre, school, hospital etc) that can be stated in general semantic terms (eg 'human organization'), while others are much more limited: run in the sense of 'smuggle' is restricted to guns, liquor and drugs. Secondly, Halliday's distinction between grammar and lexis on the basis of the 'openness' of lexical sets (in contrast to the closed grammatical set) ignores the arbitrary way in which the extension of collocability by analogy is often blocked. We can capture or catch someone's imagination but not take it, while we can catch or take someone's fancy but not capture it. Such restriction on collocation abounds. Further, Halliday's denial of a hierarchy of lexical units takes no account of the way that collocability can be seen as recursive. For example, two idioms can combine in a collocation: go at someone hammer and tongs consists of a phrasal verb idiom and an irreversible binomial: go at someone hammer and tongs I I I I idiom

I

idiom

collocation

I

A third criticism of the Firthian approach comes from Lyons (1966). He rejects the 'distributional (or collocational) theory of meaning', and argues that our ability to recognize the meaning of a word from its context depends [ ... ] upon our knowledge of the meaning of other words in these contexts and upon our realization of the paradigmatic oppositions and equivalences that hold between the word in question and other words which might have occurred, but did not in fact occur at the same point in the text. (296)

Having agreed that there is value in studying "collocations of pairs of particular items between which there holds a strong relation of unilateral, or bilateral, syntagmatic presupposition" (297), Lyons doubts "whether the right method [...] is to set up a 'collocational level' as such" (ibid) and suggests rather that the various features of collocations (not only their acceptability) should be studied separately in 'diagnostic frames'.

29 1.5.4 Collocation and colligation This emphasis on a more precise analysis of collocational features in controlled contexts has led other linguists (eg Greenbaum 1970, 1974; Mitchell 1971) to take a different path in collocational studies. While accepting the part that linear co-occurrence plays in the description of collocation, they assert that items must also be observed in their syntactic environments if the true nature of collocational meaning is to be described. This view indicates a crucial difference from the Firthian view of the relationship between 'collocation' and 'colligation' (an habitual relation between word classes: eg 'motive verb' + 'directional particle'). Firth (1957b) considers that "a colligation is not to be interpreted as abstraction in parallel with a collocation of exemplifying words in a text" (182). As a result of the separation of levels, Firthian statements about collocational relations are made without reference to colligation. Mitchell (1971), on the other hand, sees the distinction as a matter of degrees of generality. He puts lexis at one extreme and grammar at the other end of a scale of particularity generality: "linguistic awareness is divisible into more particular (lexical) and more general (grammatical) levels" (48). The term 'colligation' refers to a particular structural pattern that is realized by one or more collocations: a collocation is always an exponent of a colligation. This conception of the relationship between collocation and colligation is also stressed by Greenbaum (1970, 1974). He criticizes the Neo-Firthian, 'item-oriented' approach for "obscuring syntactic restrictions on collocations" (1970:11). Lexical relations must be examined syntagmatically to determine "the restrictions on the collocability of one lexical item with another" (ibid: 9), restrictions which may be grammatical. Computational studies, based on probability, are unable "to establish a criterion for determining whether two items are collocating" (ibid: 11). Therefore, "statements of collocation and collocability require syntactic information in at least some instances" (1974:82), in order to account for the co-occurrence restrictions, for example, between certain verb-intensifier collocations: (1) (2) (3) (4) (5)

Ί much prefer a dry wine'. *'I prefer a dry wine much'. Ί don't like him much'. *'I like him much'. Ί like him very much'.

The unacceptability of (2) and (4) is due to such grammatical restrictions as position of the intensifier in relation to the verb, its premodification and the negative/ affirmative context. Such restrictions on co-occurrence vary as to their generality, but it is a question of degree rather than differences of kind (grammatical against lexical). Syntactic information is necessary to the description in cases such as the above; in others, restrictions can be described in semantic terms (though still within a constant syntactic frame) (Cowie 1981b:223). The important conclusion to be drawn from this discussion is that collocation is not purely a matter of probability of linear co-occurrence, since there are grammatical and semantic or purely lexical factors that constrain lexical co-occurrence in a large number of cases. One of the tasks facing the lexicologist constructing an integrated model for composite units is to make general descriptive statements about lexical relationships between items which are highly diverse in nature, extremely numerous, very hard to measure quantitatively and about which speakers of the language have differing opinions. As Cowie (1981b) puts it in connection with dictionary presentation of such phenomena:

30 Explicitness of treatment depends in part on whether the potentiality which items have to co-occur with a given headword in certain syntactic relationships can be defined in general terms, ie in terms of semantic features which can be assigned to lexical items. (223)

For collocational studies it is important to differentiate between restrictions on co-occurrence that are semantically determined and restrictions that are arbitrary. 1.6 Russian phraseology Neo-Firthian lexicologists have been primarily interested not in classifying types of collocation, but in the phenomenon of'collocation' itself and in what it contributes to linguistic meaning as a whole. In contrast, central to Russian lexicology is the establishment of criteria for the precise description of phraseological units and their varying degrees of fixedness. In §1.4.5 it was shown how clear distinctions can be made at the idiomatic end of the spectrum on the basis of semantic criteria (ie between phraseological fusions and unities). The nature of Vinogradov's non-idiomatic 'phraseological combinations', however, is much more problematic, the arguments being based on what degree of freedom should be allowed in tests of substitution. To put the debate at its simplest, with 'free phrases' having no arbitrary limitations on the substitution of their components and 'phraseological fusions' being almost totally constrained, where is the dividing line to be drawn for the very large number of intermediate cases? As will be seen, it is this issue that presents the greatest challenge. Amosova (reported in Arnold 1986) challenges Vinogradov's criteria for determining which expressions to include within the scope of 'phraseology'. The latter admits as phraseological combinations expressions such as meet the demand, the requirements, the necessity, in which the noun substitutes are few and the figurative sense of the verb remains constant. Amosova, on the other hand, applies the stricter criterion that a figurative sense should be determined by a single item, as in grind one's teeth, where no other noun could be used in combination with the verb in that sense. She calls the more restricted category (grind one's teeth) 'phrasemes' and the less restricted (meet the demand etc) 'phraseoloid', excluding the latter from the phraseological region of the spectrum. For the present study the phraseological significance of a collocation is influenced by the demands placed on learners in acquiring and producing the form. Their problems are not entirely removed in cases where the selection of a figurative sense of a verb is determined by a limited set of nouns rather than by a single item. The concept of restriction can apply furthermore to cases where a set of two or more verbs with synonymous figurative senses is determined by one set of nouns but not by another. For example, one can assume or take on importance or a form\ assume, take on or adopt a role\ but only acquire importance, not *acquire a role (see diagram in §1.7.4.2). There is therefore a case to be made for considering not only all of Vinogradov's phraseological combinations as restricted, but extending the borderline somewhat further by analysing his criteria more precisely. Cowie (forthcoming) breaks down the defining features of the phraseoloid exemplified by pay one's respects/a compliment!court to someone in the following way: a) a verb used in a figurative sense ('offer' or 'extend'); and b) contextual determination by an (arbitrarily) limited set of nouns one's respects, a compliment, court - each in this case with further grammatical idiosyncrasies; but

31

c) determination of no other verb in the same sense by the same limited context - so for example present, if possible at all as a synonym, is only collocable with plural compliments, as in present one's compliments to someone). [Cowie forthcoming] The distinction between the Russian approach and that represented by Aisenstadt (1979, 1981) and Cowie is partly indicated by the difference in terminology. The former appears to begin from the most fixed, idiomatic end of the spectrum and attempts to establish criteria for demarcating the phraseological zone: ie, what is phraseological? The latter is more concerned with separating restricted from open expressions, to identify at what point language users are manipulating expressions as wholes rather than composing them according to generative rules: in other words, what is not free? Within the category of restricted collocations there are clearly further degrees of restriction, relating to the application of the criteria discussed above. The difficulty lies in where the line should be drawn to mark the cut-off point between the restricted and the free. Cowie suggests that by relaxing criterion c) and 'letting in cases with a limited range of synonymous verbs" one admits as phraseological such combinations as call/convene a meeting/session/gathering, in which the figurative sense of a small number of synonymous verbs is determined by a limited set of nouns. Furthermore, if criterion c) can be waived, a case could be made for the relaxation of one or other of the other two criteria. Waiving criterion b) results in the inclusion in the phraseological band of the spectrum those combinations of a verb in a specialized sense and a potentially large number of collocating nouns. For instance, the sense of run meaning 'manage' is the 22nd meaning out of 30 in the OALD entry, and could be regarded as figurative. However, the restrictions on the object nouns can be stated in general semantic terms ('human organization') and do not form a limited set: business, hotel, shop, school, stall, village fête etc, which would suggest that these are free collocations. Nonetheless, these combinations could still be regarded as a phraseological problem for the learner. There are some nouns in this semantic set that could be regarded as the more central collocates of run (such as business, hotel), whereas others might more typically collocate with manage {factory, shop).9 The learner is faced with a choice of verbs that may be contextually- determined, even by a relatively open set of nouns. It is also the case that some verbs with restricted 'technical' senses, such as commit, have collocates that can be stated in general semantic terms ('offence'). Again, the significant phraseological focus is on the nouns and on the fact that the selection of verb is highly restricted. Criterion a) is given a broad interpretation by writers such as Aisenstadt, Cowie and Weinreich, who refer to 'technical' or 'specialized' senses, terms which, like 'figurative', are hard to define, though some senses are clearly restricted to a technical register (for example, those of acquit or sentence in legal language). Relaxing this criterion further can also be justified by consideration for the learner. 'Specialized' could be interpreted not only as pertaining to a technical register, but also to certain domains of everyday life. One of the very few collocational dictionaries of English (Benson, Benson and Ilson 1986a) includes as collocations (ie not free combinations) write a letter and speak a language. The senses of these verbs would surely be regarded as literal. The significant characteristic of these combinations must be that the choice of verb in the required sense is severely constrained, in which case criterion a) is relaxed while c) is maintained. A decision on exactly where the line should be drawn will be left to later in the discussion (§1.7.4.2).

It is in cases such as these that computational methods have a role, since they could provide evidence from a large corpus to separate two sets of collocates.

32

The following diagram attempts to clarify the differences between the three interpretations of 'phraseological' above, the double line indicating the borderline between what is regarded as restricted or phraseological and what is free: Amosova

free phrases

Vinogradov

free phrases

phraseoloids

Aisenstadt/

open

restricted collocations

Cowie

collocations

3

phrasemes

I phraseological combinations

2

1

p. unities

p. fusions

p. unities

p. fusions

figurative

pure

idioms

idioms

[Figure 1.2 Comparison between Russian and European phraseological continua] 1.7 Criteria for the classification of composite units From the discussion above, two principal criteria emerge as central to a taxonomy of composite units: the semantic characteristics of the whole or parts and restrictions on commutability. As was seen in §1.1 in the various approaches to the classification of word combinations, careful attention must be paid to the ordering of criteria in developing a precise framework for analysis. A comprehensive classification which gives equal weight to all categories in the continuimi would apply the collocational criteria before the semantic. As we shall see, all semantically opaque composites (the most opaque being idioms) are to some extent collocationally restricted; indeed, there is some degree of correlation between the two characteristics. However, not all collocationally restricted composites are opaque. Restriction and opacity can both be seen as continua, but semantically opaque composites can also be seen as a sub-set of those which are collocationally restricted, resulting in a hierarchy of composite units represented in the following diagram: composite units

non-restricted

restricted

This hierarchical arrangement, nevertheless, fails to indicate that restriction and opacity both vary in degree. The main characteristic of the approach followed by Cowie, Greenbaum and the Russian phraseologists is that it sees no watertight division between the various types of collocation and idiom, rather a continuum from, at one extreme, the most freely co-occurring lexical items and transparent combinations to, at the other, the most cast-iron and opaque idiomatic expressions. An alternative representation would place the various categories on a scatter diagram such as the following (with the positions of the categories of composite units intended only for illustration):

33

As one would expect in a model of this kind there are items which could be considered central members of a category and others which straddle the rather fuzzy boundaries. Categories would therefore need to be presented on this model as shaded and overlapping areas, rather than as discrete points. This does not, however, represent a useful visualization of the framework for practical application. A much greater degree of differentiation within the criteria above is needed to provide a procedure for the systematic analysis of data that reflects the continuum model underlying this approach. The main aim of this study is to examine the phraseological features of a variety of written English and, in particular, to explore in detail that part of the phraseological spectrum that lies between the two well-recognized extremes of free collocation and idiom. It is our contention that this area has been neglected both in empirical studies of native-speaker performance and in second language learning and teaching. It will have become clear that, in adopting the continuum model, a set of criteria is required that will not only identify this central area, but also distinguish between degrees of restriction within it. Therefore, in spite of the specific focus, the attempt is made to construct an integrated model that will encompass the whole of the spectrum of composite units, though the greatest amount of detail will be required to describe restricted collocations. In the following sections criteria will be presented and applied to examples of composite units in order to establish a set of analytical procedures for the later description of natural language data in Chapters Three and Four. It will be shown that by controlling the order in which the criteria are applied the continuum model can be maintained. The focus is on the four major phraseological categories mentioned in the previous sections (their formal definitions will be given in § 1.8): free collocation restricted collocation figurative idiom pure idiom

blow a trumpet blow a fuse blow your own trumpet blow the gaff

34 These have been given a variety of labels by various writers: • free collocations (Aisenstadt 1981); open collocations (Cowie 1981b); free phrases (Arnold 1986, Mel'cuk forthcoming); free word-combinations (Aisenstadt 1979); free constructions (Weinreich 1969) and free combinations9 (Benson 1986) • restricted collocations (Aisenstadt 1979,1981; Cowie 1981b,1983,1986); phraseological combinations (Arnold 1986); phrasemes (Amosova as reported by Arnold 1986; Mel'cuk forthcoming); semi-idioms (Cowie 1983); transitional combinations (Benson et al 1986b); bound collocations (Cruse 1986) • figurative idioms (Cowie 1983); phraseological unities (Arnold 1986); dead metaphors (Cruse 1986); non-fossilized metaphor (Cowie 1981b) • pure idioms (Cowie 1983); phraseological fusions (Arnold 1986). The following criteria will be discussed in order to develop an integrated framework: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

syntactic patterns institutionalization semantic transparency commutability semantic unity motivation

The application of the last two criteria, semantic unity and motivation, has already been demonstrated in the identification and classification of idioms. It will be shown that the first two criteria listed here cannot be used to make fine distinctions between degrees of collocational restrictedness. The focus of the following sections will therefore be primarily on using criteria 3 and 4 to distinguish between restricted and free collocations. 1.7.1 Syntactic patterns There are two relevant grammatical features of composite units: firstly, it is a fundamental requirement of the approach that they are exponents of recognizable syntactic units (grammatically well-formed), and, secondly, that composite units of various degrees of idiomaticity can be found in a wide diversity of syntactic structures. A third characteristic is that there are restrictions on the range of syntactic patterns in which a given lexical combination may be found, though this is not regarded as a defining criterion, and will be discussed separately below (§1.7.5). Firstly, Zgusta (1971) points out that the sequence grandmother he in the sentence Having killed the grandmother he tried to fly with the money is of no interest to lexicographers in not 9 The decision to use 'free combination' rather than 'free collocation' implies that the term 'collocation' should be reserved for expressions that are to some extent restricted. On the other hand, the use of 'free collocation' is perhaps an attempt at comprehensiveness and includes that category in a discussion of 'collocations and idioms'. More importantly, the use of the term 'free collocation' allows that category a place in the continuum model. In the present framework this is not regarded as a crucial issue, though 'free collocation' will be used to reinforce the continuum perspective. The distinction between 'free' and 'open', on the other hand, is not viewed as significant.

35

being 'meaningful' (138), and this is largely because noun + pronoun is not a recognizable syntactic unit. It is certainly not the kind of sequence that a language user, whether native speaker or learner, would pay any attention to. The syntactic properties of composite units were referred to in §1.5.4 above, where the dependence of collocation on colligation was discussed. Although the approach followed here takes the property of well-formedness as the most basic criterion of compositeness, it is unable to distinguish between any of the phraseological categories. The second feature (syntactic diversity) is particularly emphasized by Aisenstadt (1979, 1981), who focuses on the range of patterns commonly realized by familiar composites, listing the following: verb + noun verb + prep + noun adjective + noun phrasal verb adverb + adjective

command admiration jump to a conclusion auburn hair take off stark naked

Other syntactic patterns covered in studies of composite units include preposition + noun (eg under stress; Nagy 1978) and irreversible binomials (combinations of noun + noun, adjective + adjective etc: eg bed and board, sweet and sour, Malkiel 1959). According to Aisenstadt, the most productive and wide-spread patterns are the verbal ones and these have been the most extensively studied. Of those studies which have focused on a particular syntactic pattern, the following have selected verbal constructions: Aisenstadt (1981) and Cowie (1991, 1992) on collocations of transitive verbs and direct objects, Greenbaum (1970, 1974) on verb-intensifier collocations and Altenberg (1993) on verb-complement constructions. In addition, Benson et al (1986a) list 19 grammatical and four lexical collocations (out of the 34 syntactic patterns recognized in the collocational dictionary) with a verb as one of the elements. As will be seen, it is the verbal patterns that are of most interest in this study and they will be used for most of the examples in this section. Benson (1985) makes an important distinction between combinations of noun/ verb/ adjective + a closed class word (for example, argument about, act as, different from), which are termed 'grammatical collocations', and 'lexical collocations', which "consist of two 'equal' components, such as verb + noun or adjective + noun" (191). This distinction can be seen in the organization and treatment in the BBI Combinatory Dictionary (Benson et al 1986a) of collocates of the, chiefly noun, headwords. It is also regarded as important for this study, which will narrow its focus to lexical collocations. The linguistic processes involved in forming the two types of collocation may be similar, in that in a grammatical collocation a noun may arbitrarily select a preposition (for example, at anchor, by accident, in advance, on purpose). As was pointed out in §1.5.3, the open/closed distinction between lexical and grammatical for classes cannot be rigidly maintained in collocational studies, since in very many cases sets of lexical collocates are not open. However, the demands of lexical collocations on a learner's competence are seen as the greater. Mastering grammatical collocations can be viewed as part of grammatical competence, even if the restriction on choice is often arbitrary. Lexical collocations, on the other hand, involve not only restrictions on the combination of items from two (or more) open sets, involving semantic criteria that are far from obvious and highly complex, but also possible restrictions on grammatical features such as the use of articles and structural transformations such as pluralization. As Benson et al (1986a) suggest, lexical collocations are usually treated as having two lexical elements, even though they are often associated with optional additional grammatical

36

items. These items may be articles (carry (a/the) responsibility), quantifiers (summon up (all) one's energy) or possessives (summon up (one's/my/his etc) energy). These grammatical 'extras' are important indications of the relative flexibility of these composites, but they do not affect the cohesion between the principal items under examination. As a result, the analysts mentioned above generally focus their attention on the two lexical components of such collocations. In addition to these cases, where the possible grammatical fillers are specifiable, there are optional lexical items, especially adjectives, which are less constrained (eg carry the (heavy/ onerous/ ministerial/ temporary etc) responsibility). Some may be considered collocational complexes, in which the larger combination is a recognizable unit as a whole while at the same time being composed of both grammatical and lexical collocations. Consider, for example, have a significant effect on something. have

a

significant

effect

on

sth

lexical

lexical grammatical

This can be analysed into the primary lexical collocation have an effect, in which an article is required (cf *have effect, take effect)·, embedded in that is the lexical collocation significant effect, in which the adjective is an optional modifier; and thirdly there is a grammatical collocation between have an effect and the prepositional phrase on sth. Note that, despite the complexity of the whole, its lexical pairings correspond to well-formed syntactic structures (transitive verb + object noun, modifier + head noun etc). 1.7.2 Institutionalization The requirement that composite units should be realizations of well-formed grammatical structures does not distinguish those that are in some way distinctive, memorized or prefabricated from the most ordinary and banal well-formed constructions. The additional criterion of institutionalization is the feature that first makes a collocation noticeable to the analyst before other criteria are applied. Bauer (1983) uses the term to indicate a stage in word formation: "The next stage in the history of a lexeme is when the nonce formation starts to be accepted by other speakers as a known lexical item [...] the potential ambiguity is ignored, and only some of the possible meanings of the form are used (sometimes only one)" (48). The final stage is 'lexicalization' "when the lexeme has [...] a form which it could not have if it had arisen by the application of the productive rales of the language" (ibid). Lipka uses the term in an identical way: "A complex lexeme is institutionalized when the original nonce-formation is accepted by other speakers as a known lexical item" (1990:96). While Bauer's analysis is concerned with word-level description, Pawley (1985a) applies these terms to phrasal expressions, which he considers capable of similar stages of development. In parallel to Bauer's distinction, Pawley distinguishes between "well-formed expressions that are lexicalized (lexemes) and those that are not (free expressions or nonceforms)" (103). In considering the numerous criteria for establishing whether an expression has the status of a lexical item (related primarily to its inclusion in a dictionary), he suggests that its 'customary status' is a contributory factor: "Many named concepts are backed by customary ways of behaving which confirm and reinforce their status as social institutions" (105). Among

37 such 'conventional' or 'institutionalized' expressions are go to school/church/work and take a vacation, and he comments "probably the large majority of customary institutions are denoted by phraseological expressions" (106). Since institutionalization is a property of both single lexical items and collocations, it could be claimed that this criterion ought to be applied first, before the syntactic requirement. However, the view taken here is that, while all (except for a few asyntactic idioms) composite units are syntactically well-formed, not all are institutionalized. Thus, grandmother he fails the first test, while carry a rabbit passes the syntactic test but is rejected from further consideration as not being institutionalized. 1.7.2.1 The institutionalization of free collocations This feature helps primarily to distinguish between nonce-forms and lexicalized phrases. According to this criterion, there might be three categories of free collocations. Firstly, there are nonce-forms: one-off combinations, such as We bland them out (heard on the radio in connection with feeding children with fast food). These are defined by Bauer as coined by a speaker/writer on the spur of the moment to cover some immediate need [...] there are large numbers of nonce formations which are used on very few occasions (perhaps no more than once) and, in the cases where they do appear more than once, they are used by different speakers, so that their status as nonce formations is not affected. (Bauer 1983:45)

This category of free collocations is relevant to the discussion of native and non-native deviation later in this study. It might also be seen as outside the realm of collocation, and would be better classed as free combinations, if that distinction were insisted on (see footnote 9, above). Secondly, there are the run-of -the-mill combinations ("épithètes aussi banales que belle, grande, petite, vieille [with valise]" Hausmann 1979:188) that are predictable and generated by the language system, with nothing distinctive in their semantics or communicative function to make them institutionalized or memorable: for example, affect world trade. Some writers have suggested that this category is not as large as it might be assumed (Minaeva forthcoming), since in very many cases one can identify some feature of a combination that limits extension by analogy. This, however, is to apply the term 'free' in a very limited way. The third category consists of those combinations that are institutionalized, though not restricted by semantic and collocational features. These are very often familiar collocations in which both elements are used in a literal sense, such as go to school. These will be returned to in §1.7.4.1 below. 1.7.2.2 The institutionalization of restricted collocations This criterion is regarded as an essential requirement in the description of restricted collocations. While free collocations are institutionalized to a greater or lesser degree, it is considered that restricted collocations are fully institutionalized, in that they are memorized as wholes and used as conventional 'form-meaning pairings' (Pawley 1985a: 101). However, for the purposes of the present analysis, institutionalization cannot be used as a criterion for distinguishing between free collocations and restricted collocations. In other words a combination can be institutionalized and yet be free, though all restricted collocations are institutionalized. Of the examples of institutionalized expressions given by Pawley (go to school/church etc and take a vacation), those with go would be considered by some as free

38 collocations (since both elements are used in their literal senses), while take a vacation would be classed as restricted. 1.7.3 Semantic transparency/opacity While the first two criteria, grammatical well-formedness and institutionalization, serve to distinguish composite units from ungrammatical sequences of words and from nonce formations, they fail to separate free from restricted collocations. The features central to that distinction are, firstly, the semantic nature of the lexical elements and, secondly, their resistance to substitution. Firstly, the semantic nature of a composite unit is complex and is affected by two identifiable factors: the meaning of the individual components, and the meaning of the whole. The central focus of the analysis is on whether meaning attaches to the whole or to the parts of a unit, and, in the latter case, whether the sense at one point is contextually determined. Aisenstadt (1979) refers to 'the meanings of the constituents' and thus fails to differentiate between the semantic nature of the different elements. Considering each element separately (as does Cowie 1983) produces two initial cases: one in which both elements are used in their primary, literal senses , and the other in which "one word [...] has a figurative sense not found outside that limited context"(xiii). The first would be classified as a free collocation, the second as a restricted collocation. The third possibility, in which both elements are semantically specialized (seen, for example, in slang expressions, such as case the joint), indicates a greater degree of semantic unity verging on idiomaticity. This criterion therefore also serves to distinguish between restricted collocations and some idioms. (The nature of semantic unity has been discussed in §1.4.6.1.) 1.7.3.1 The semantic transparency of free collocations Little needs to be said of the application of this criterion to free collocations. The meaning of each free collocation as a whole is quite transparent, easily derivable from the juxtaposition of the elements in a recognizable syntactic pattern. Both constituents are used in a primary literal sense, and as Arnold says of the collocations cut bread, cut cheese, eat cheese: the information is additive in the sense that the amount of information we had on receiving the first signal, ie having heard or read the word 'cut', is increased, the listener obtains further details and learns what is cut. The reference o f ' c u t ' is unchanged. (1986:168)

1.7.3.2 The semantic transparency of restricted collocations As Aisenstadt (1979) points out, restricted collocations are not figurative as wholes; their components can be shown to contribute independently to the meaning of the whole. Comparing/ooi the bill with fill the bill (which is fully idiomatic), one can see that bill in the first refers to an actual bill of payment, while in the second it makes no analysable individual contribution to the overall meaning. Even though the verb foot in the sense of 'pay' collocates with no other noun (it contributes to a 'unique collocation'), it can be shown to have independent semantic status (see below). Restricted collocations do not form single semantic units and their total meaning is derivable, though often indirectly, from the meanings of the component parts. The essential semantic criterion is the presence of at least one element being used in some kind of specialized sense. The concomitant of this is that one element has a

39 literal, unidiomatic meaning. Thus, a blind alley, while not being literally blind, is still literally an alley. Aisenstadt suggests three ways in which the meaning of one element of a restricted collocation might be 'specialized': • having a narrow, specific meaning ('technical' according to Cowie 1991): eg shrug in shrug one's shoulders • used in a secondary, abstract or figurative meaning: eg grind in grind one's teeth • having a weakened, grammaticalized meaning (or 'delexicaF Cowie 1991): eg make in make a decision An alternative analysis of shrug one's shoulders, above, would interpret shoulders as the unique collocate of the verb shrug, producing the following conundrum: Is the meaning of shrug specialized because it is only used in connection with a single part of the human body, or is its limited application to shoulders a result of its specialized meaning? The answer is possibly to be found in the diachronic development of collocations of this kind. The fact that shrug became the conventional verb to indicate a specific bodily movement prevented its extension to collocations with other nouns such as eyebrow. Some unique collocates such as curry in curry favour and foot in foot the bill are so limited in collocability as to make these collocations very close to idioms. This property of restricted collocations demonstrates the crucial factor of lexical context in any description of restricted collocation. It is the fact of being within the (in this case unique) context of the lexeme bill that determines the selection of the highly specialized sense of foot. This last example is at the outer limit of restricted collocations since the restriction is so severe. It verges on the idiomatic, not being easily decipherable, as the sense o f f o o t meaning 'pay' is not present in other contexts. While the semantic properties of both free collocations and idioms can be discussed separately from their commutability, it is in practice very difficult to discuss the semantic nature of restricted collocations in isolation from the question of commutability. This category stands between idioms, which are semantically unitary with very little lexical substitution, and free collocations, which have semantically independent constituents and (relatively) open commutability. If the continuum is accepted as a valid model, it is clear that in the central area there will be a tension between these two features: as the semantic transparency of an individual item decreases, its sense becomes more specialized, which coincides with a limit on the lexical contexts in which that sense is found and therefore the number of collocates. This conception perhaps leads Benson et al (1986b) to refer to these as 'transitional combinations'. It is the criterion of semantic independence that classifies combinations with unique collocates as restricted collocations. Cruse (1986) applies a 'test of recurrent semantic contrast' to 'bound collocations' (highly restricted collocations), such as foot the bill and curry favour, to show that their elements are semantic constituents of the expression and that, therefore, they are transparent and unidiomatic. Since these composites display collocational uniqueness, the test must be applied indirectly with two other established semantic constituents: foot (John agreed to — the bill) query

40 pay (We shall certainly — the fees) query [Cruse 1986:30] First, recurrent semantic contrast between pay and query establishes query as a semantic constituent. This status is then transferred to foot. Additionally, since it is relatively modifiable foot the bill can be distinguished from idioms: I'm expected to foot

the bill. the electricity bill, all the bloody bills!

However, Cruse also demonstrates the similarity of such collocations to idioms in that they require the presence of a specific lexical item, and pronominal anaphoric reference will not suffice: I've just got the bill for the car repairs. ?/ hope you don't expect me to foot it. It is an interesting, though secondary, aspect of this approach that restricted collocations are an important source, diachronically, of figurative idioms. The fact that they are institutionalized and relatively stable over time leads them to acquire figurative senses as a whole. There exists therefore a class of homonymous combinations that are both restricted collocations and figurative idioms. It is possible, for example, that grind one's teeth, close shave and sacred cow are more often used as idioms than as (non-idiomatic) restricted collocations. At the other end of the range of restricted collocations, one finds the grammaticalized (or delexical) verbs such as take, make, get etc, which contribute little to the meaning of the composite. Aisenstadt (1981) suggests that, because of their 'weakened, grammaticalized meanings' they are in some expressions interchangeable: have a look, take a look, give a look (57). Sinclair and Renouf (1988) point out that "the primary function of'make', for example, is to carry nouns like 'decision/s', 'discoveries', 'arrangements'" (153), and that, since the noun objects of such verbs are frequently deverbal, there is often the possibility of an alternative synonymous expression: to take a look or to look (this feature is investigated further in §3.7.3). Although these collocations are to all intents and purposes transparent, they illustrate an essential characteristic of restricted collocations: the arbitrariness of the co-occurrences. If take and make add little or nothing to the meaning, why do we say take a look not make a look? This is true of other categories of verb. If one can assume or adopt a form (regarded as synonymous), why can one assume but not *adopt importance? As Aisenstadt puts it "[restricted collocations are] restricted in their commutability not only by grammatical and semantic valency [...], but also by usage" (1979:71). It will be appreciated that the focus here is on lexical items in specific senses (what Cruse calls the 'lexical unit'), not on the items as such. It is the contextually-determined special sense of adopt in adopt a policy that contributes to making the collocation significant. On occasions a greater amount of context is required to discover pragmatically which of two or more homonymous collocations is present. A distinction, therefore, must be drawn between a free collocation such as put a question (at the end of the questionnaire), where put has the literal meaning of 'place', and the restricted collocation put a question (at the end of the lecture), in which put has the figurative meaning of 'ask'. Whether a verb is therefore monosemous or

41 polysemous is of great importance, though this characteristic does not have a direct correlation with the degree of restriction. Delexical verbs such as make, which could be regarded either as having large numbers of discrete meanings or very little lexical meaning, form very large numbers of restricted collocations, while represent, which is given six senses in OALD, is rarely found in restricted collocations. On the other hand, the monosemous verb shrug is found solely in the restricted context of shoulders. 1.7.4 Commutability Turning now to the second major criterion for distinguishing between free and restricted collocations, the internal lexical relations within a composite unit (ie the restrictions on the possible substitution of one element in the unit without a consequent alteration in the meaning of the other element), it was seen in §1.6 that this criterion has a central role in the analysis and that fine distinctions can be made by defining precisely what degree and type of substitution is permitted. It must be recognized, however, that just where the line is drawn, especially in distinguishing between restricted collocations and free collocations, is a matter of judgement and cannot be established beyond doubt. For example, in explode a myth, myth could be replaced by idea or notion but there may be no more than one or two other direct objects of the verb explode when used with the sense 'show to be false' (to substitute bomb (explode a bomb) would of course result in a change in the meaning of explode). Is that a sufficient limitation to qualify the combination as restricted? 1.7.4.1 Commutability in free collocations In each of the examples below it would be possible to substitute one of the elements with the other element retaining its original meaning: explode a bomb explode a mine / discover a bomb walk in walk past / rush in broken window open window / broken cup The co-occurrence of these items can be predicted from their individual lexical meanings, and the only limits on further substitution are 'logical' (to follow Cruse's (1986) use of the word), determined by our knowledge of the world: How many things can be exploded? In how many directions is it possible to rush? However, while in many of the cases above choice may be almost entirely free, as Arnold (1986) points out, "such substitution is never unlimited" (167). Substitution and transformation, even in these transparent, open and free composites are not entirely openended. As was shown in §1.5.4 above and as Greenbaum (1970) suggests, there are idiosyncratic restrictions even in those cases which cannot be stated in general semantic or grammatical terms: It is then necessary to list the actual lexical items that may collocate with a particular item. For example, •'The man badly wished them to leave' seems deviant though 'The man badly wanted them to leave' is acceptable [...] 'Badly' is collocable with 'want' but not 'wish' or desire', synonyms of 'want'. (9)

42 Since there is neither syntactic nor semantic motivation for this restriction, it must be regarded as arbitrary. Cruse (1986) accounts for the such limitations on co-occurrence by means of a taxonomy of 'co-occurrence restrictions'. These are divided, initially, into two types. Firstly, 'selectional restrictions' can be explained in terms of the 'logically inescapable concomitants' of the semantic traits of a lexical item: for example IThe spoon died is unacceptable because of the necessity of an animate subject for DIE, and therefore transgresses truth conditions. 'Collocational restrictions', on the other hand are arbitrary: ?The aspidistra kicked the bucket is unacceptable because of the arbitrary restrictions of the verb: Unlike die, kick the bucket (in its idiomatic sense) is fully normal only with a human subject. But this additional restriction does not arise logically out of the meaning of kick the bucket. The prepositional meaning of kick the bucket is not 'die in a characteristically human way', but simply 'die'; the restriction to human subjects is semantically arbitrary. (1986:279)

In a similar vein Mitchell (1971) discusses 'weak collocational constraints', indicating very discrete semantic selection "operating in the cases of barristers who are disbarred, doctors who are struck off [...] officers who are cashiered" etc (54). In these cases the verb is restricted in application to a small number of semantically close-knit nouns. At this point, as restrictions on co-occurrence become more severe, such items must be considered to be on the periphery of the category. Although the combination cashier an officer meets the semantic criterion, in that both cashier and officer are used in their primary sense, it is hard to regard this expression as completely free, since the presence of cashier strongly predicts a very limited set of object nouns (officer plus the names of particular ranks in the armed forces). An emphasis on the criterion of commutability would place these composites in the category of restricted collocations (see below). An alternative view is to consider the sense of cashier technical, though this raises the problem, better addressed in connection with restricted collocations, of what technical means. Arnold recognizes this grey area and sets up an intermediate category of 'semi-fixed combinations': In semi-fixed combinations we are not only able to say that such substitutes exist, but fix their boundaries by stating the semantic properties of words that can be used for substitution, or even listing them. [...] For example, the pattern consisting of the verb 'go' followed by a preposition and a noun with no article before it ('go to school', 'go to market', 'go to courts' [sic] etc) is used with nouns of places where definite actions or functions are performed. (1986:167-8)

This category shares characteristics with both free and restricted collocations, in being fully transparent yet limited in both its commutability and syntactic variation; it also conforms to Cruse's classification of co-occurrence restrictions. It illustrates the lack of defined boundaries, but establishing an additional category does not substantially assist in separating free from restricted items.

43 1.7.4.2 Commutability in restricted collocations The criterion of semantic specialization in restricted collocations is very closely related to restricted commutability, and the latter is the most complex criterion in the identification of this category. It was seen in §1.6 that a precise description of this property provides a means of subdividing the category into degrees of fixedness. It was shown that Amosova's insistence on the strictest application of the criterion limits the category to unique collocations, such as grind one's teeth. Vinogradov, Cowie and Aisenstadt are agreed on a more liberal interpretation of the restriction. Put at its simplest, Aisenstadt suggests that in a composite unit with two elements either one or both elements may be limited in commutability: • In make a decision, decision is limited in the possible alternative verbs that could collocate with it: reach, take, arrive at, come to (+?). • In shrug one's shoulders neither shrug nor shoulders can freely co-occur with other items. (+?) In §1.6 it was also shown that this criterion can be used to subdivide restricted collocations into three degrees of restriction, according to how the limitations on commutability are analysed: 1. The most restricted category results from the collocability being limited to a single item in each element, the figurative and the literal: for example, curry favour. No other noun can collocate with the verb, and no other verb has this specific sense. 2. Secondly, the specialized sense of the verb is determined by (ie is found in the context of) a limited set of nouns: table a motion/bill/an amendment. An alternative is the determination by one noun of a figurative sense shared by a small set of verbs: adopt/assume/take on a role. 3. Thirdly, and least restricted, is the case when there are possible substitutes of both elements: synonymous substitutes of the figurative element (usually the verb), and semantically related though non-synonymous substitutes of the literal (usually a noun): carry out/conduct an experiment/a test/a survey. It should be clear how this subdivision helps to reinforce the place of restricted collocations in the continuum. The first subcategory, as has been suggested, verges on the idiomatic, due to its extreme lack of commutability. It may be a matter ofjudgement whether such cases are placed on one side of the borderline or the other, but since they are quite small in number and are undeniably restricted, it is not a matter of critical importance. The second category would be regarded as central restricted collocations. The third subcategory, however, is far more problematic, raising the question: How limited is 'a limited set'? In §1.6 it was shown how, by isolating the three properties (specialized sense of the verb, limited set of noun collocates, and limited set of synonymous verbs), the results of relaxing each one can be examined. In view of the interest of this study in the problems of language acquisition, a Uberai interpretation of restrictedness will be adopted. This will permit two of Amosova's three criteria to be waived, insisting on the semantic specialization of the verb but permitting a limited set of collocates for both the verb and the noun.

44 An interest in the performance of native and non native speakers supports the recognition of this third category of restriction (number 3 above). Learners of a language are not only concerned with the idiomatic and opaque combinations, those with semantic obscurity such as foot the bill. They need awareness and knowledge of those combinations which are arbitrarily blocked. It is unlikely that learners would produce *foot the entrance fee, since the semantic eccentricity in that subcategory is so marked and idiosyncratic that having learned foot the bill they would be wary of attempting to extend the collocability o f f o o t by analogy. They are more likely to produce *adopt importance, being unaware that, although both adopt and assume collocate with role, of those two only assume collocates with importance. The difference can be seen between problems of encoding and decoding. Foot the bill might pose problems of decoding, but would be avoided by most learners in production. Problems of encoding might arise more often at the free end of the spectrum, where learners are unaware of the arbitrary way in which restrictions operate. An attempt at overcoming the difficulties of classification at this point in the continuum is outlined in Cowie (1986), where the concept of'overlapping collocations' is introduced. Given the above collocational mismatches and blockages, it is useful to see such verb + noun collocations as clusters of verbs with synonymous figurative senses collocating with lexical sets of nouns. If it can be shown that certain potential collocations in the cluster are arbitrarily blocked, those collocations that are acceptable could be regarded as restricted. Establishing a cluster in this way helps to set limits to the number of substitutes permitted for a collocation to remain restricted. Beginning from a collocation such as assume importance, it is possible to identify a set of nouns that collocate with assume in that sense (form, role, mantle) and a set of verbs that can be substituted in that sense (acquire, take on), adding adopt for the sake of illustration, which is found in the same set of data examined in Chapter Three and collocates with more than one of the above nouns. It can then be established which of the total possible collocations are acceptable:

It is clusters of collocations such as these, typical of a formal register, that present a pitfall for learners and provide great scope for producing forms unacceptable to native speakers. It seems appropriate, and in keeping with the approach presented above, to consider the gaps, such as *acquire a role, as the result of adopt/assume/take on a role being restricted collocations.10 An alternative attempt to describe the limitations on the collocability of restricted collocations can be seen in Mel'cuk's use of specifiable semantic properties of collocates to indicate a degree of fixedness. His descriptive 'apparatus' for describing collocations consists of an array of about 60 lexical functions, representing a set of semantic relations used to describe 'restricted lexical co-occurrence'. Each function applies to a number of items across several syntactic patterns, indicating a generalized semantic relationship, though for each item the collocates that realize the function are limited. For example, the function Magn ("an

10

Examples such as these provide another insight into the historical development of collocations. Overlaps could be viewed as the accidental merging of collocations that became institutionalized independently. There is no communicative need nor, perhaps, any linguistic mechanism for the resulting gaps to be filled.

45 attribute denoting 'very', 'to a great extent'" Apresyan et al 1969:13) is realized by stark in conjunction with the adjective naked, by as α rake with thin and by infinite in combination with the noun patience. However, these functions seem to be too general and applied too broadly. They are not sufficiently associated with specific lexical items to reflect the cooccurrence potential of such lexical items. It must be noted that Mel'èuk's interest is in a highly formalized lexicographic approach rather than the description of natural language data. 1.7.5 Syntactic restriction This final feature is not presented here as a criterion for the classification of composite units. The possibility (or, as revealing, the impossibility) of transformation from one syntactic pattern to another using the same lexical components is an important descriptive tool for discovering the degree of flexibility or frozenness of a particular category of composite unit. Cowie and Mackin (1993) present a detailed account of such 'transforms' (the results of transformations): for example The prices came down can undergo the emphatic transformation to Down came the prices. Much has been made of the transformational deficiencies of idioms (for example, *The bucket has been kicked), and analysts such as Fraser (1970) working in the Chomskyan tradition have attempted to develop an ordered set of transformational restrictions as a means of categorizing idioms (see §1.4.3 above). Restriction on the syntactic transformations associated with given composite units can be seen as more or less parallel to the continuum of restrictedness, with free collocations likely to be grammatically unfettered, while the purest idioms are occasionally so grammatically eccentric to be asyntactic (eg blow sb to kingdom come). However, this cannot be used as a criterion for identifying and distinguishing between classes of composite units, in spite of the attempts of Fraser (1970). 1.7.5.1 Syntactic restrictions on free collocations Free collocations can undergo 'normal' syntactic variation, dependent on the grammatical properties of the individual items. For example, whether or not entertain the boss can also occur in a passive construction depends on what grammatical class the verb entertain belongs to, not on the lexical combination as such. Other variations, such as nominalization (the explosion of a bomb), emphatic inversion (in walked my mother) and relativization (the road across which we ran), are similarly grammatically predictable. 1.7.5.2 Syntactic restrictions on restricted collocations As one moves away from the free association of lexical items, there is a tendency for composite units to become increasingly structurally frozen, to display transformational deficiency. For example, while the adjective blind in the collocation the blind man can also occur predicatively as in the man is blind, the same is not true of the restricted collocation blind alley (*the alley is blind). As has already been said above, any restrictions on syntactic variation apply to individual composites and are unpredictable from the structural type. The V+N entertain the idea could have the noun replaced by the pronoun it: I said I wouldn 't entertain it. However, foot the bill (also V+N) could not be rephrased as *I said I wouldn't foot it. As arbitrary restrictions on co-occurrence, semantic coalescence and syntactic rigidity increase, a composite unit can with more certainty be classified as an idiom.

46 1.7.5.3 Syntactic restrictions on idioms Whatever syntactic variation that may be permissible is a property of the individual figurative idiom. In certain cases a syntactic change will force the composite to be analysed, or 'decomposed', in which case the literal interpretation will come to the fore: (In the following examples the passive transform will be used for the purposes of comparison.) He acted the part well, figurative idiom "He pretended convincingly to be other than he was". The part was acted well, literal sense "The character in the drama was well represented by the actor". In other cases a figurative idiom can undergo that transformation without being decomposed: They closed ranks in the face of strong opposition. Ranks were closed in the face of strong opposition. There are of course cases where the transformation would not be permitted in either the figurative or literal interpretations: The party must change gear. IThe gear must be changed. This is due to the oddity of the passive sentence in its literal sense, rather than any peculiarity of the composite. One can therefore summarize the possibilities for syntactic variation thus: ^transformation impossible in both literal and figurative senses ii)transformation possible only in literal sense (which forces literal interpretation) iii)transformation possible in both Pure idioms are potentially subject to the same syntactic restrictions as figurative idioms. Asyntactic expressions such as {blow) to kingdom come or by far and away are clearly the most extreme cases: being syntactically deviant, they are completely fixed in their grammatical structure and lexical form. 1.8 Summary of the framework As was suggested at the outset of the last section, having identified the criteria needed for a detailed analysis, it is possible to reproduce the continuum model by controlling the order in which they are applied. A clearer picture can be gained of how they fit into the analytical framework by presenting them diagramxnatically. By applying the criteria in this way, the four categories can be given the definitions below adapted from a variety of the sources discussed above:

47

1.7.1

1.7.2

1.7.3

1.7.4

1.4.6.1

1.4.6.2

wellformed

institution -alized

specialized element

collocationally restricted

semantically unitary

unmotivated

free collocations

V

V/x

X

X

X

X

section

restricted collocations

V

V

V

V

X

X

figurative idioms

V

V

V

V

V

X

idioms

V

V

V

V

V

V

[Figure 1.3 Application of criteria to the continuum of composite units] Free collocations: "Combinations of two or more words in which the elements are used in their literal sense. Each component may be substituted without affecting the meaning of the other." Restricted collocations: "Combinations in which one component is used in its literal meaning, while the other is used in a specialized sense. The specialized meaning of one element can be figurative, delexical or in some way technical and is an important determinant of limited collocability at the other. These combinations are, however, fully motivated." Figurative idioms: "Combinations which have figurative meanings in terms of the whole. They may permit arbitrary synonymous substitution of one or more elements. They have a current literal interpretation and are clearly motivated." Pure idioms: "Combinations that have a unitary meaning that cannot be derived from the meanings of the components. They permit almost no substitution, and are unmotivated." 1.9 Conclusion This chapter has aimed to show that the dominant treatments of a complex and linguistically significant area of the English language have been focused too narrowly. Idioms are easily recognized and not a serious problem for description, though they have received considerable attention from lexicologists and lexicographers. At the other extreme it is desirable for purposes of efficiency to eliminate from the description those combinations whose cooccurrence can be accounted for by normal grammatical and syntactic processes. The central area of the spectrum, though it poses much greater challenges, has been barely recognized and is little understood. An adequate description of restricted collocations involves the consideration of several criteria that are at once independent linguistic features and also interrelated. It has been shown that by a careful and detailed analysis of the criteria of semantic specialization and restricted commutability in particular the nature of such collocations can be illuminated. There are mechanisms not only for distinguishing between the major phraseological categories, but also for making finer distinctions between degrees of restriction. In the following chapter evidence will be sought to deepen an understanding of the place of restricted collocations in language processing, to discover how their linguistic conventionality affects their comprehension and production.

Chapter Two The Processing of Conventional Language 2.0 Introduction In Chapter One a framework was presented for the classification of the very broad range of word combinations in English and for the more detailed description of one specific category, composite units. These include restricted collocations, the chief focus of this research. The main characteristic of the descriptive framework of composite units is a continuimi, and lexical combinations are assigned to parts of it according to: • degrees of semantic transparency /opacity; • degrees of restricted commutability within the lexical complex; and • degrees of semantic unity. In parallel, though not directly correlated with these, is a scale of structural frozenness/ flexibility. It has been claimed that native speakers in the course of normal language production make use of, or have at their disposal, very large numbers of such prefabricated units, which are familiar to both speaker and hearer and contribute to communication in significant ways. At the outset of Chapter One it was suggested that the communicative significance of such forms lies in their conventionality for language users, and that the semantic and collocational features identified above can be regarded as the linguistic correlates of their conventional status and account for the native speaker's familiarity with them In order for the full significance of these composites to be understood, it is necessary to consider both their social status, as institutionalized, 'inter-organism' phenomena (Halliday 1978), and their psychological ('intra-organism') status as memorized wholes. In addition to studying their linguistic features, therefore, the mechanisms for retrieving and comprehending them must be examined. The main hypothesis of this chapter is that the role of prefabricated language in discourse is to facilitate the fluency and naturalness of an utterance (what Pawley and Syder (1983) call 'nativelike fluency' and 'nativelike selection'). The use of conventional forms (those familiar to and anticipated by the hearer/reader) enables the speaker/writer to communicate with ease and fluency and to concentrate attention on higher-level features of discourse processing (Pawley and Syder 1983). The search will therefore be directed towards the psychological evidence for the processes of encoding and decoding conventional language. However, psychologists have not explicitly set out to address this question, and it is not the aim here to conduct experimental research; therefore, what follows is an attempt to infer plausible answers from the available evidence. From the point of view of the present research it must be admitted, in addition, that almost no psycholinguistic studies in this field relate directly and explicitly to restricted collocations, but focus to a very large extent on idioms, which might seem to deny the more general relevance of such findings. Further, some inferences have to be made on the basis of studies of word-level processing. However, two arguments support the consideration of such studies here. Firstly, as will be seen, psychologists interested in this field have almost without exception been working in the US and have relied heavily on the rather narrow linguistic analysis of lexical complexes dominant there (and reviewed in Chapter One). It will be shown below that

49 in some cases they have discovered independently the inadequacy of that perception and have broadened the scope of their enquiries. They have come to realize that idiomatic expressions are not merely anomalies requiring a special mechanism for processing, but extreme examples of a much more general phenomenon that is too ubiquitous to be peripheral. It is useful to examine how this development has come about. Secondly, it has been suggested above that restricted collocations are related to idioms along a continuimi, cannot therefore be strictly separated from them and, indeed, may over time become idioms. What is true of the processing of the latter, therefore, may very well be true to a lesser degree of the former. In addition, some researchers (eg Gibbs and Gonzales 1985) have identified differences of degree within the processing of what they call idioms, leaving the door open to the extension of the cline beyond that category. In other words, if mental processes can be shown to operate in a variable way, for instance in the speed with which a pure idiom is recognized as opposed to a figurative idiom, one could feel more confident in seeing the gradient model of composite units as somehow psychologically valid. Additionally, if there is evidence that these processes are as easily and rapidly capable of dealing with lexical complexes as with simple lexical units, support would be given to the view that many syntactic structures are treated by the speaker/hearer as unanalysed wholes. It is the aim of this chapter, firstly, to consider briefly some views on the nature of the mental lexicon, to provide a background to the empirical studies; secondly, to examine the research done on the place of idioms in the lexicon and how they are processed; and, thirdly, to review those approaches that take account, or admit the existence, of other categories of conventional lexical complexes that might be processed in a similar way. Since one of the chief interests of this study is the written production of learners of English as a foreign language, consideration must also be given to the place of prefabricated language in second language acquisition. However, that discussion is very closely connected with empirical studies of performance and will be left to Chapter Four, when data from students' writing will be examined. 2.1 The Mental Lexicon It is recognized here that the emphasis of the following account of the mental lexicon is on the storage and retrieval of single words rather than word combinations. However, there is support for the extension of some of these conclusions to the processing of lexical complexes. As was seen in Chapter One, Pawley (1985a) shows how the institutionalization and lexicalization of word combinations and single words can be understood in the same terms. It is also a matter of general agreement in the studies of idioms reported below that they are to varying degrees word-equivalents. There are two aspects of the processing of words relevant to the processing of composite units. Firstly, the problem of accounting in the lexicon for complex and compound words (eg kindness or kind-hearted) in relation to monomorphemic words (kind) may be parallel to that of dealing with lexicalized composite units (red tape) in relation to free collocations (red ribbon). Secondly, the ambiguity of single words has a similarity to the supposed difficulty in distinguishing between the literal and figurative senses of an idiom 2.1.1 Processing complex entries There is no need here to decide between all the conflicting claims about how items in the mental lexicon are arranged (for a comprehensive survey see Aitchison 1987a). It is, however,

50

clear that the generativist insistence that the organization of the mental lexicon should conform to their theoretically neat concept of 'parsimony' need not be accepted uncritically. Katz and Postal (1963), in analysing the idiom kick the bucket, for example, from the point of view of some psychologically 'real' language system, claim that "elementary considerations of grammatical simplicity" require that it "cannot have in one case the structure Intransitive Verb and in another the structure Verb + Noun Phrase" (277). The evidence seems to suggest that psychological reality is much more untidy. The problems of complex and potentially ambiguous entries can be overcome by the concept of multiple storage. For example, Glanzer and Ehrenreich (1979) propose the existence of two lists of items in the lexicon: one a short 'ready-access' list of high-frequency words; the other the complete list. Forster (1976) concludes from a study of the mental accessing of compound words (such as headstand and postcard) that "each word is likely to be filed under multiple descriptions, and [...] lexical access consists of selecting a whole range of techniques for recovering the entry" (283). Aitchison (1987b) reviews the evidence relating to the storage and retrieval of polymorphemic words containing various types of affixes and suffixes (eg inflation, distinguished). Using the evidence of slips of the tongue, she attempts to resolve the debate over whether speakers analyse and resynthesize complex words from minimal units according to generative rules, or rely on conventional forms that they have heard and memorized. She concludes that "polymorphemic words are retrieved from the mental lexicon as structural wholes", with the ability to split and rebuild them available as a "back-up option": 'Humans start by using memory, and routine possibilities. If this proves inadequate, they turn to computation" (13-14). The evidence from other studies suggests that what is true of complex words is also true of multi-word complexes. An increasingly widely accepted model of word recognition, referred to as the 'spreading activation model' by Aitchison (1987a), emphasizes its probabilistic nature. It depends on guesswork aided by anticipation from context. This model integrates phonological and semantic/syntactic information in a process of narrowing down a range of phonologically similar possibilities as more data is received about the shape of the word and tested against knowledge of the wider context of meaning and structure. The importance of context is clearly relevant to the perspective of this study and will be returned to shortly. A model of this kind, which gives weight to 'post-access decision-making' (the processing that takes place after initial word recognition), provides a useful framework for examining the processing of the type of lexical complexes under discussion in this research. 2.1.2 Lexical ambiguity Cutler (1983) considers the evidence concerning the processing of lexical entries which contain semantically, morphologically or syntactically complex information. The first category, of most interest here, includes lexical ambiguity, and Swinney (1979) points out that most words can [...] have different meanings, [so] it seems reasonable to suggest that the post access decision process [...] may be a general process. For any word, some subset of all the information which is originally accessed [...] may be selected for further processing and integration into ongoing sentential analysis." (1979:658)

Referring to studies conducted by both Swinney (1979) and Lackner and Garrett (1972), Cutler concludes that "accessing a lexically ambiguous word involves accessing all its senses"

51 (Cutler 1983:46), and that "the processing of a word necessarily involves access of whatever [...] information is associated with it in the lexicon" (ibid:45). 2.2 Processing idiomatic expressions Moving on from the processing of single words to the processing of composite units, it can be seen that it is this semantic feature of ambiguity that becomes the focus of attention. From the very beginning, psycholinguistic studies of non-literal language, developing as they did within the generativist school of linguistics, focused on frozen figurative expressions (ie idioms), as being the most word-like. They began with the assumption that they were, at least potentially, ambiguous, since they were assumed to have simultaneous literal interpretations. One possible reason for this narrow focus was that such expressions were well recognized and easily available in idiom dictionaries. Some psychological studies (eg Gibbs 1980, Mueller and Gibbs 1987) have taken as their experimental material lists of isolated idioms from Boatner, Gates and Makkai (1975) A Dictionary of American Idioms or from Fraser's 1970 study (Swinney and Cutler 1979), though most give no indication of the origin of their research material. One of the first studies, Bobrow and Bell (1973), clearly places itself in the school of Transformational Grammar by its uncritical references to Chafe (1970), Chomsky (1965), Katz and Postal (1964) and Weinreich (1969). One of the chief weaknesses of many psychological studies of idiom comprehension in particular has been a reliance on a linguistic description of idioms that is very narrow in its perspective. It is to the credit of some psychologists (see Cutler (1983) and Gibbs and Gonzales (1985) below, for example) that they have overcome this handicap and have drawn conclusions from empirical studies that have begun without such preconceptions and converge with those derived from the kind of rigorous lexicological description reviewed in Chapter One. In particular, they have recognized that features of the context exert an influence on processing at an early stage, ruling out ambiguity and making the question of whether an idiom has a literal interpretation unnecessary or irrelevant. 2.2.1 Idiom List Hypothesis Bobrow and Bell take their cue from Katz and Postal's concept of a separate list of phrase idioms in the mental dictionary "listing elements like kick the bucket [...] which have a compositional meaning, as well as an idiomatic one" (Katz and Postal 1963:276). They set out to show that the consequence of this is that there are two "distinct processing modes for idiomatic and literal ambiguities" (1973:346). Their experimental method is one broadly followed by most researchers in later studies. Subjects are exposed to a set of either literal or idiomatic ambiguous sentences presented on a computer screen: for example, Mary fed her dog biscuits is regarded as literally ambiguous, though in syntactic and morphological terms rather than lexical, while John gave Mary the slip is idiomatically ambiguous. Initially, the sentences are presented completely out of context, and the subjects are required to indicate (by pressing a button when they have comprehended the prompt) which interpretation they perceive first. In a later part of the experiment a set of four preliminary sentences are provided that bias the subjects towards either the literal or the idiomatic interpretation of the target ambiguity. The study was able to conclude that there are two separate strategies available for comprehension of literal and idiomatic strings: "the observed effects can only be ascribed to differences in mode of processing" (346). This viewpoint is termed the 'Idiom List Hypothesis'. It should be pointed out at once that this hypothesis, though frequently referred to, has been unanimously rejected since Bobrow and Bell claimed to have confirmed it.

52 2.2.2 Lexical Representation Hypothesis An alternative viewpoint suggests "that idioms are stored and retrieved from the lexicon in the same manner as any other word" (Swinney and Cutler 1979:525). This approach rejects the existence of a special idiom processing mode, and suggests that "computation of both meanings [...] is simultaneously initiated" as soon as the first item in the string is encountered (ibid). The idiom is retrieved whole from the lexicon, and structural analysis is undertaken on these words at the same time that the lexical access of the entire string (which is merely a long word) is taking place, (ibid)

The focus is clearly on the lexicalization of idioms ('a long word' as far as the mental lexicon is concerned), and the experimental method makes much use of subjects' response time (measured in microseconds) as the physical manifestation of processing ease or difficulty. Evidence for this view comes chiefly from findings that an (uncontextualized) idiomatic string can be recognized as an acceptable English expression (in a Phrase Classification Task) more quickly than a structurally identical literal control string (eg break the ice versus break the cup). (Support is provided by Ortony et al 1978 and Estill and Kemper 1982.) An extension of this study attempts to test Fraser's hypothesis that idioms can be ordered hierarchically according to degrees of frozenness (see Chapter One §1.4.3). Swinney and Cutler examine the claim that "the more frozen an idiom is, the stronger its lexical status"1 (1979:531). Taking a sample of idioms from across Fraser's full range, paired with appropriate unidiomatic controls (eg FO jump in the lake/dive in the lake·, Fl climb the walls/paint the walls; F2-4 break the ice/break the cup; F5 bury the hatchet/bury the coffins), they measured subjects' reaction time in a Phrase Classification Task. Their results showed no significant difference between the degrees of frozenness, leading them to conclude this does not mean that linguistic descriptions of frozenness have no perceptual validity, but rather that the susceptibility these idioms show to transformational change is a factor applicable to these items as lexical items. (532)

In spite of the weaknesses in these experimental methods, attempting to draw conclusions about psycholinguistic processes on the basis of minute differences in subjects' response time, and on the basis of stimulus material of doubtful validity, the studies cited in this section raise important issues that are taken up by researchers less committed to the TG approach to idiomaticity. Firstly, the negative finding of Swinney and Cutler above lends support to the point discussed in Chapter One that transformational deficiencies in composite units apply to individual units rather than whole classes of expressions. (However, see Gibbs and Gonzales (1985) below for alternative evidence.) One cannot therefore postulate a single scale of frozenness as a correlate of degrees of unitary storage. This opens the door to a search for other features that may account for the mental organization of prefabricated units.

An interesting piece of ancillary research on idiomatic frozenness appears in Cutler (1982), entitled 'The Colder the Older'. Here she sought to establish whether the most frozen idioms (by Fraser's measure) were those that had been in the language the longest. By simply correlating Fraser's numerical hierarchy with the earliest cited date for the idioms in the OED, she found data to support the conclusion "that those idiomatic expressions which are least susceptible to syntactic operations are also those which have been in use in the language in their idiomatic form for the longest time." (319) Although comments in this study have suggested that Fraser's hierarchy cannot support such conclusions, it is valid to claim that idiomatization is an historical process requiring the 'formal invariance over time' of word combinations (Cowie 1988:135).

53 Secondly, the role of context in the ease of processing is recognized as significant, for example by Estill and Kemper (1982). Confirming Swinney and Cutler's (1979) findings, they use a variety of measures to test the speed of recognition of an idiomatic interpretation against the literal one. Subjects were able to guess accurately and rapidly the identity o£ as well as phonological and semantic information about, the words required to complete idiomatic expressions such as bury the hatchet. For them context is an essential factor: depending on the nature and length of this context, the meaning of figurative idioms may be more rapidly integrated [into sentential interpretation] than the meaning of literal idioms2. (567)

Although this conclusion appears to support the weight attached to contextual factors elsewhere in this study, the word 'context', which is potentially ambiguous, is left undefined. The term receives further elaboration below. Thirdly, there is evidence to show that the existence of an idiomatic interpretation reduces the likelihood of a literal interpretation. For example, Van Lancker and Canter (1981) found that not only can an idiom be processed more quickly than the same construction used literally, but there is a measurable bias among experimental subjects towards an idiomatic interpretation when presented with 'ambiguous' sentences (eg That's a real snake in the grass) excised from a tape recording of a disambiguating paragraph. They account for this as undoubtedly based on the listeners' previous real-language experiences, for which these sentences have far broader applicability as idioms than as literal statements. (67)

They also tested speakers' ability to 'mark' a sentence as either literal or idiomatic in a recording of their speech, and found that this could be done successfully with a variety of prosodie clues. In writing, they point out, in the absence of such acoustic signals, a writer will often include a 'literal marker' (such as literally), since a potentially idiomatic expression (such as She acts like she owns the place) "has such a strong built-in idiomatic meaning that one would typically avoid using that phrase in a literal fashion"3 (ibid). Again, this supports the view presented in Chapter One (§1.4.3) that the idiomatic sense of an expression is not a subsidiary interpretation, but will usually dominate over the alternative literal interpretation, if one exists. 2.3 Idioms as conventional expressions More recently the emphasis on the potential ambiguity of idioms has been questioned and has shifted to the conventionality of an expression rather than its semantic opacity (especially Gibbs 1980, Gibbs and Gonzales 1985, Mueller and Gibbs 1987; additionally Gibbs 1986b on indirect speech acts). In other words, there has been a move away from seeing non-literal language as a problem for mental processing towards the view that the conventionality or

2

By 'figurative idiom' they mean an idiom used in its figurative sense rather than its literal sense (a 'literal idiom'). All examples given in the paper are of figurative idioms in the sense the term is used in Chapter One, suggesting that Estill and Kemper have focused on expressions with both a figurative and a potential literal interpretation. The word literally is also found in speech to signal the speaker's recognition of an expression's potential idiomaticity. However, on occasion it is used in conjunction with a pure idiom, where there is no possibility of a literal meaning: literally sing their hearts out (an utterance heard on the radio), which results in nonsense. Here literally could be interpreted as an intensifier.

54

familiarity of a multi-word unit in fact eases comprehension and production in communication. In this view such expressions are therefore not to be seen as anomalies in the language system, but as normal (and extremely widespread) phenomena, essential to linguistic communication. This emphasis on conventionality necessarily results in closer attention being paid to context, though the use of the word must be treated with caution. In Chapter One contextual factors in the description of composite units were related to the co-occurrence of lexical items and the relative freedom they have to combine in conventional forms. The use of 'context' in the psychological studies under discussion here, on the other hand, refers to short pieces of preceding co-text constructed to provide semantic clues for the interpretation of pre-selected idiomatic strings. For example: (Literal Context) Nick and Sue were listening to Jackson Browne on the radio, "All Jackson Browne songs sound alike." Sue said. "Now isn't that the same song we heard him do on TV recently." "No." Nick replied; "He's singing a different tune " (Idiomatic Context) On TV there was a program discussing Carter's first year in office. One reporter talked about the military budget. "In the campaign Carter promised to cut the budget." "But now that he's President," "He's singing a different tune. " [Gibbs 1980:150] These contexts are used experimentally to bias the subjects' interpretation towards either a literal or a idiomatic meaning, represented by the paraphrases: "He's not singing the same song" or "He has now changed his mind", and a comparison is made with results when no context is given. The results show, firstly, (confirming Estill and Kemper 1982) that "idioms take significantly less time to process than literal interpretations" (151) and, secondly, that subjects will "automatically analyze the conventional, idiomatic interpretation", even when presented with a literal use of the expression: the ease of processing an expression is dependent on how 'conventional' it is. This conclusion suggests the opposite of Bobrow and Bell's Idiom List Hypothesis: subjects will select the idiomatic meaning first before rejecting it in favour of the literal This view has become known as the Direct Access Hypothesis. Gibbs makes the important point that this bias towards the idiomatic results from the literal meaning being unconventional. The purpose of an individual language user storing and reusing institutionalized forms is that they are familiar to other speakers and constitute conventional 'form-meaning pairings'. There is no communicative point, other than for special stylistic effect, in using an idiomatic expression in a compositional, literal sense (what Gibbs calls 'unconventional'): unconventional utterances, like the literal use of an idiom, will require additional processing in order to find and verify some schemata in memory to account for the sentence. (152)

55 This is reflected in the paradoxically better results obtained in tests of subjects' recall of unconventional (literal) uses of idiomatic sentences: in other words, although unidiomatic combinations initially took longer to interpret than idiomatic expressions, they were remembered more easily a short time after: "If the original encoding of an item is difiBcult to accomplish, later memory of the event will usually be good" (ibid). This phenomenon could, perhaps, also be seen in the way that a novel idiomatic expression first comes to the attention of a language user and becomes more easily memorized as a result of the initial difficulty in interpreting it from context.4 While the context is necessary to force, somewhat artificially, a literal interpretation, the recognition of an idiom is to some extent independent of context. In a no-context experimental condition: because idioms have strong conventional meanings associated with them, it is possible that context plays much less of a role in helping the listener construct an appropriate interpretation. (150)

It is important to distinguish in these findings between two factors involved in processing idiomatic expressions. Firstly, the initial recognition that a string is to be treated as an idiom may require contextual information, if only to signal the lack of semantic clues that might prompt a literal meaning. Secondly, the retrieval of the idiom's conventional meaning, as a semantic unity, does not require clues from the co-text. It is the context-independence of idioms that contributes to the fluency of communication. Gibbs' conclusion usefully broadens the scope of psycholinguistic enquiry, and the following is taken to be a call for analysis to be done on natural language data rather than on disembodied laboratory samples: What effect does the interaction of convention and context have on understanding and memory for various types of speech? By concentrating on these aspects of language use, we can begin to formulate models of linguistic processing based on how speakers conventionally use words to convey meaning instead of the putative, literal interpretation of sentences outside of everyday conversation. (1980:155)

Gibbs and Gonzales (1985) take the question of conventionality further and re-examine the evidence for psychological correlates of Fraser's degrees of frozenness, which Swinney and Cutler (1979) failed to find. However, while the latter took Fraser's hierarchy at face value, and designed test materials directly from it, Gibbs and Gonzales question its basis: "[its] organization [...] may not necessarily be representative of most English speakers' mental lexicons [...] since the hierarchy was based solely upon Fraser's own intuitions" (244). Instead, they first establish empirically a 'frozenness continuum' of 32 verb + particle idioms (thereby controlling the structural pattern, which Fraser failed to do) by asking subjects to rate from 1-7 the similarity between an idiomatic sentence and its paraphrase. The sentences presented idioms in five transformations: gerund nominalization, adverb insertion, particle movement, passivization and action nominalization. These empirical data "do not correspond in any regular way with Fraser's frozenness hierarchy" (246). Having established that speakers are sensitive to the frozenness of idioms, the researchers sought to show that idioms are differentially represented in the mental lexicon and that "frozen idioms should be more lexicalized than flexible idiomatic expressions" (248).

1 can remember the occasion when I first encountered the idiom to bell the cat, and with some effort was able to interpret the metaphorical sense from the context. It was instantly memorable and its later recognition would not need contextual clues.

56 In a Phrase Classification Task these predictions were confirmed by subjects responding faster to frozen idioms than to flexible ones, and this was not simply due to an ability to predict the completion of such idioms from the initial words. They also had better short-term memory for the more flexible idioms, presumably because, not being so solidly implanted, they are more difficult to retrieve from the lexicon. Among the explanations considered are either that "idioms have representations for each of their permissible syntactic forms" (256) or that "people have abstract knowledge about the possible syntactic operations that can be applied to any particular idiom" (258). These conclusions appear to contradict the notion of transformational deficiencies. Gibbs and Gonzales conclude by raising important wider issues connected with the linguistic status of idioms and their relationship with other linguistic forms: most idioms are derived from novel, metaphorical expressions which presumably are not represented as phrasal units in the mental lexicon. When the process of idiomatization occurs and an expression becomes more lexicalized, there must be some constraints on what possible syntactic forms the idiom can take. [. . .] [this] limited productivity [...] must be due to the relation between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. (1985:258)

Although the literal meaning of an idiom plays no part in its comprehension, people may still have knowledge of the internal semantics of idioms which constrains the possible syntactic forms these expressions may take, (ibid)

This emphasis on the tension between the internal structures of idioms on the one hand and their unitary lexical status on the other is of particular relevance to Cruse's discussion of the systematic and idiosyncratic restriction of collocations in the last chapter (§1.7.4.1). Following on from the above discrimination between degrees of idiom frozenness, Mueller and Gibbs (1987) considerably refine the semantic classification of idioms. They identify four distinct types: 1. 2. 3. 4.

those with meaningful literal and idiomatic interpretations: break the ice those with no literal interpretation: blew your cool isomorphic literal and idiomatic interpretations: out on a limb those with more than one figurative interpretation: give her a hand ('help' or 'applaud')

The first two categories are familiar as figurative and pure idioms, and the existence of the fourth is recognized in idiom dictionaries, but the third seems to need some explanation. Mueller and Gibbs give two additional examples: on this ice (presumably a misprint for on thin ice) and below the belt. In each case they suggest that the literal and figurative uses convey the same meaning; there is not the same degree of dislocation of meaning that is found in figurative idioms: to hit someone below the belt is both literally and figuratively to behave in an unsporting way. This description suggests that at the literal stage the expression has acquired a connotation that becomes institutionalized in the metaphorical extension. They conducted a variety of comparative experiments using a range of tasks, such as recognition of the appropriate paraphrase of sentences with literal or idiomatic meanings or judgements of the meaningfulness of a string. They were able to confirm inter alia that idioms are differentially represented in the lexicon according to the number of meanings attached to each idiomatic string. Specifically, they conclude that the more meanings that are associated

57 with an idiom the faster it was processed (ie type 4 above was processed the fastest). The explanation offered for this paradox is the following: Assuming that every interpretation of an idiom is a separate lexical entry and that the idioms in question are of similar frequency, the search process among lexical entries occurs in a random fashion. The probability of encountering one of the multiple entries of an idiom with several meanings is greater than of encountering one of the fewer entries of an idiom with few meanings. (1987:78)

This deduction, based on an untested hypothesis, seems over-elaborate for a rather minor phenomenon, though an additional finding, relating to the stylistic effect of idiomatic language, is of more interest: in a context which biases the reader towards making both literal and idiomatic interpretations of type 1 idioms (common in advertising and newspaper headlines, for example) reaction times are much slower. The attention-grabbing effect of this creative disruption of conventional language use appears to be measurable. Finally in this section, Cacciari and Tabossi (1988) set out to explain in more detail the processes involved in comprehending idioms. Significantly, they appear to consider context in terms of the co-occurrence of lexical items. Using Italian data, they suggest that idiomatic meanings are associated with a particular configuration of words rather than being fully lexicalized and stored as wholes. Idioms become available to the reader/hearer once that configuration becomes sufficiently recognizable. In detecting an idiomatic string, some part or parts (the 'key') are more relevant than others. The position of the key within the idiom will vary according to the syntactic structure of the string, but until it has been accessed, recognition of the idiom cannot take place: on many occasions an idiom becomes identifiable after a preposition, an article, or the lack of or the unusual occurrence of one such lexical item. [. . .] There are idioms for which it is difficult to establish which word plays the role of the key, [... ] [but] what is crucial is the co-occurrence of those words. (679)

This view is consistent with the spreading activation model of word recognition and, being more abstract, allows for syntactic variation within the same configuration. It is also clearly relevant to the notion underpinning the present study, that idioms are at one extreme of a continuum of collocation. These findings allow for the possibility of variability in the strength of cohesion between the components of a composite unit. They are also relevant to the lexicographical treatment of idioms (discussed in Chapter Five). In listing idioms in alphabetical order, a dictionary maker might choose to use the dominant lexical item (key) as the headword if methods could be devised for discovering which word that was in a given idiom (no trivial task). It is not clear, however, whether Cacciari and Tabossi are suggesting that the combination of such lexical items will be recognized as idiomatic in whatever syntactic pattern it might occur. If it is mere co-occurrence of words in their base form that is 'crucial', the objection can be made that idiomaticity is often lost in some structural patterns (see Chapter One §1.5.4 for discussion of 'colligation' and §1.7.5.3): for example, while he acted the part well could be taken as idiomatic, the part was acted well could only be literal. Their approach has the advantage, however, of taking into account the on-line processing of an idiom and helps to answer one of the major puzzles of idiom processing. A reader or hearer is faced with the fact that any word in the flow of language is potentially part of an idiomatic string. How can he/she know until the idiom is complete that the expression is to be interpreted idiomatically and as a whole, and at the same time process it more rapidly than a nonlexicalized literal string of the same structure?

58 This hypothesis implies that a string is initially interpreted literally, until the idiomatic configuration is recognized, and Cacciari and Tabossi question the experimental basis of the Lexical Representation and Direct Access Hypotheses. In their view idioms are not stored as if they were words, there is no effect of frozenness on the processing of idioms, and findings which suggest that idioms are processed faster than literal sentences are the result of inadequate experimental procedures. For them differences in the speed of processing idioms depend on "how early in the string they become identifiable" (680). Their focus on the individual identity of the lexical components of an idiom is a usefiil counterweight to the dominant emphasis on an idiom's lexicalization and raises important issues that need further investigation. 2.4 Metaphorical language Although there are some contradictory findings among this group of studies, the overall result of this work is to broaden the perspective on non-literal language by weakening the role of literal interpretations, emphasizing the importance of contextual factors and raising the issue of lexical co-occurrence. The shift of emphasis allows a more precise examination of the processing of figurative language relevant to conventional language use as understood in the present study. One important manifestation of this perspective is the comparison between types of metaphorical expressions. Harris (1976) studied the time taken by subjects to produce paraphrases of both metaphorical and non-metaphorical stimuli presented visually. He claims that, since there was no appreciable difference in the time taken, the two types of sentence were processed as easily. More specifically, he rejects the 'two-stage' model of non-literal language processing, which suggests that a literal interpretation must be computed first. (It is important to remember here that throughout the literature on language processing there is an assumption that speed correlates directly with ease of processing.) Although the material used (quotations from Shakespeare) might raise an eyebrow, his conclusions seem to be supported by later research and common sense. He claims, for example, that metaphors "do not introduce considerable difficulty in comprehension. [...] Metaphor is a common and useful facet of language. [...] It is not a highly specialized form of the language" (314). Quoting Verbrugge (1977), he suggests that a literal interpretation is not necessarily the simplest and most basic, and that "a metaphorical meaning is often easier to process in a given speech act context" (ibid). 2.4.1 The processing of novel metaphors In a more conventional set of experiments Ortony et al (1978) compare the interpretation of figurative and literal sentences both with and without context. They also find that living metaphors in sentences take no longer to process than the same sentences intended literally, provided there is sufficient context. Without sufficient context metaphorical language takes longer to process. The increased speed of comprehension is related to 'contextually generated expectations', which they explain in terms of schema theory. Briefly, the context brings to the fore a number of schemata which aid the interpretation of both literal and (novel) non-literal sentences. With little or no context fewer if any schemata are generated. Additionally, they show the importance of context in the distinction between processing novel and conventional figurative sentences. Whereas the two-stage inferential model may apply in the interpretation of a novel metaphor (when the literal interpretation is first activated and then rejected), the context would usually immediately determine the selection of the

59 idiomatic meaning of a conventional non-literal expression: for example, pain in the neck would very rapidly be recognized as an idiom in a context of something being an irritation. There would therefore be no need for computation of the literal meaning. Pickens and Pollio (1979) also discuss the significant distinction between novel and frozen or conventional metaphors. Figurative competence (the ability to comprehend and use figurative language such as metaphor, idiom and simile), they claim, is not a unitary phenomenon. It varies according to the cognitive task being undertaken (for example, composition, simile production and preference or comprehension of metaphor), which brings into play a subject's competence in either novel or frozen metaphor. A particularly interesting conclusion, reminiscent of Vygotsky (1962), is that in language production school-age children proceed from novel to frozen use. The process of formal education leads them to inhibit novel usage as inimical to getting a good grade. ... creative compositions were better thought of as exercises in the control and use of grammatical and lexical choice rather than as exercises requiring the use of innovative prose. (309)

In formal registers, such as academic writing, there is equally strong pressure on adult writers to conform to conventional phraseology and to suppress the urge to make creative adaptations. Further indirect support for this view of creativity can be found in Pickens and Pollio's correlations between subjects' comprehension of novel and frozen metaphor. The cognitive ability to understand a novel metaphor presupposes the ability to deal with the frozen; the opposite, however, is not true: it is possible for a respondent to select the correct alternative for a frozen figure because the expression is a familiar one; by definition, novel figures cannot be understood on the basis of similar prior knowledge (ibid)

but are comprehended through a process of problem-solving. 2.5 Selectional restrictions in processing. To return to the issue of context, it has been pointed out that the term is mainly used in psycholinguistic studies to mean the reference in discourse to the real world, which in psychological terms is used for the continuing post-access processing of complex entries. In the perspective outlined in Chapter One, however, context involves more than the topic of the preceding discourse; it refers to the co-occurrence of lexical items (identified by Cacciari and Tabossi 1988). Cutler (1983) is one of the very few working in this field to recognize the significance of this aspect of context: "certain words carry implications about their surrounding sentence context as part of their intrinsic meaning" (45). These implications are seen as restrictions on co-occurrence, and she poses the question "Is a restrictive lexical representation more difficult to process at any level than a non-restrictive one?" (ibid: 50). She quotes research involving subjects making acceptability judgements of sentences such as The ink sprayed the customer and The ink annoyed the customer, where the entry for spray is assumed to contain the restriction "liquid". She comes to the important conclusion that in the former (restrictive) contexts processing speeds are in fact faster: words embodying selection restrictions can be very efficient at selecting a set of appropriate associates, [...] construction of an overall sentence representation appears to be easier when the sentence contains a restrictive [. . .] verb, (ibid)

60 Similarly, Swinney claims that "the more the context restricts or determines the relevant sense of a word, the quicker the decision process will presumably take place" (1979:658). Clearly in a discussion of selectional restrictions it is hard to ignore the fact that very often the 'associates' that should be selected by an item (on semantic grounds) are not the ones that in fact arise in natural language. Although one knows that pregnant determines a noun denoting a female animal and lukewarm selects a liquid, pregnant silence and lukewarm reception will be familiar collocations to a native speaker and cause no problems of comprehension: When such words are applied to nouns not meeting the relevant restrictions [...] they are understood to be used metaphorically. (Cutler 1983:49)

The relevance of these conclusions to the defining characteristics of restricted collocations set out in Chapter One is clear. They can be related in particular to Cruse's taxonomy of selection restrictions, and his contention that combinations involving arbitrary collocational restrictions are semantically more cohesive than those with generalizable selectional restrictions. His view that the former are more predictable seems to gain support from Cutler's conclusion that they are processed more rapidly than those without restrictions (ie free collocations). 2.6 Lateralization Having examined in detail attempts to investigate empirically the processing of conventional language, we will briefly consider some views on the attributes of the brain that may account for these processes. Van Lancker and Canter (1981) place their findings in the specific context of research into the lateralization of brain function. They suggest that evidence both from speech aphasia and from the studies of Horowitz and Manelis (1973), Osgood and Hoosain (1974), Pickens and Pollio (1979), Swinney and Cutler (1979), among others, supports the view that "cerebral laterality differences are associated with the holistic (right hemisphere) / analytic (left hemisphere) dichotomy" (68). In other words, there is a "difference in the ways unitary phrases versus 'structurally-formulated' expressions are processed" (65). (No reference is made here to the Idiom List Hypothesis of Bobrow and Bell, which, perhaps naively, converges with this dualistic approach.) Although child language development is outside the scope of the present research, reference should be made here to the important work of Peters (1977 and 1983), who recognizes a similar neurological specialization. Her research promotes the notion that for a child many of the utterances that an adult would recognize and use as generated sequences are unanalysed holistic units: "the speech of certain children often contains formulaic phrases that the child could not have constructed from their constituents" (1983:5). She identifies two separate strategies in language development, Analytic and Gestalt, relating to the different communicative needs of pragmatic expression and reference (1977) (see below §2.9 for another formulation of the same distinction). These, she says, may relate to individual neurological differences between children, and be reflected in different language-learning strategies among adults. Having memorized a number of unanalysed chunks of language, a child has strategies for their segmentation, which provides knowledge about the grammatical workings of the language. At any point in its development, a child's lexicon will contain both holistic chunks and smaller segments analysed from them. Importantly, the larger chunks do not necessarily get deleted from the lexicon once their structural components have been identified (see §2.9

61 below). This provides further support for the notion of multiple storage of lexical units (see §2.2.1 above). The most significant implication of this view of language development for adult language production concerns the relationship between a mature speaker's memory capacity and processing speed. Peters suggests: For mature speakers of a language [. . .] formulaic speech may serve as a shortcutting device: It saves processing time and effort, allowing the speaker to focus attention elsewhere ... far from employing a minimal amount of storage space for our language, we keep on hand many representations of the "same" information, choosing in any given instance exactly that one which minimizes processing effort. (1983:3-4)

This conception of the relatively greater role played by memory has much in common with Aitchison's answer to the question: "Are humans primarily like buses, which travel along regular routes? [ie dependent on memory], Or are they like taxis, which move about freely?" [relying on computation] (1987b:3). She concludes that "people try to be buses. They turn into taxis only if the bus-route is unsatisfactory" (ibid: 14). 2.7 Implications of psycholinguistic research There naturally remain disagreements over details of exactly how the processing of non-literal language takes place. In addition to arguments about experimental validity, which the present study is unable to mediate between, these centre in particular on: • possible stages in the process of recognition, retrieval and comprehension of 'ambiguous' sentences (whether a literal interpretation is made before or simultaneously with or in default of an idiomatic interpretation); • whether idiomatic expressions are treated as if they were words; • whether the lexical processes recognize different categories of idiom. It is probable that these are arguments that can never be finally resolved, and, indeed, their resolution is not a prerequisite for continuing a discussion of the psychological reality of prefabricated language. Even though conclusions from the evidence will not therefore be definitive, there is evidence to support the following: • The speed of processing is increased by the selectional restrictions imposed by one word on another; the arbitrary flouting of such restrictions is the basis of restricted collocations, producing conventional form/meaning pairings which tend to become unanalysed wholes. • Idioms are stored in the same way as single lexical items, though the degree of lexicalization is variable according to the frozenness of the expression (ie the extent to which it permits structural transformation). • 'Normal' language processing is involved in the recognition and comprehension of idiomatic expressions; there is no special idiom processing mode; there is no correlation between literalness of language and 'normal' language use.

62 • The specialized sense of an idiom is more conventional than its literal interpretation (where one exists), in that a direct link exists between a distinct form and a specific meaning; this results in the expression being recognized faster. • The comprehension of idioms is less dependent on context than comparable literal utterances, since an idiom will retain its specialized sense in a much wider range of contexts. • There is therefore a bias towards an initial idiomatic interpretation of an utterance until the context forces it to be read literally, resulting from experience of its use as a unit. From this it is claimed that idioms are rarely ambiguous, unless ambiguity is deliberately introduced by the context. • The speed of processing is variable according to degrees of frozenness and the number of senses of a conventional expression. • Information is stored with each idiom about its internal structure and permitted variations. • Speakers are sensitive to the degree of syntactic flexibility of an idiom and are able to provide prosodie clues to idiomaticity. None of this is truly unexpected, though it is useful to have certain intuitions confirmed experimentally. Significantly, there is support for the views of Bolinger and Pawley and Syder, who have acted as a bridge between the interests of psychologists and descriptive linguists and are a useful route back to the main focus of this study. 2.8 Bolinger Bolinger (1976) focuses on the extent to which stretches of language are manipulated without prior analysis, extending the scope of such complex items beyond idioms to include collocations. Putting great emphasis on the role of memory capacity in linguistic production rather than processing power, he says "the human mind is less remarkable for its creativity than for the fact that it remembers everything" (2). Language is limited in its creativity because speakers reuse unanalysed patterns that they have heard before and therefore have stored in memory. To illustrate this Bolinger mentions the 'strokes of illumination' people get when they realize for the first time the inner structure of a previously unanalysed expression and its relationship with another. In a riposte to TG grammarians' reductionist theories, he says it is time to take account of the psychological side, [. . .] even when a linguist can analyse, it does not follow that he ought to. [. ..] When grammarians begin to claim psychological reality for their models, they are presuming on explanatory adequacy of a deeper sort than they had bargained for. (12)

It is psychological evidence of the kind presented above that Bolinger is assumed to be referring to. He concludes by reproducing Van Lancker's (1974) model of automatic/propositional speech modes, parallel to Van Lancker and Canter's division between holistic/analytic processing and Peters' Gestalt/Analytic strategies in child language development. However, while the last two models represent a two-way neurological split, the first consists of a continuum from novel utterances at the prepositional extreme (with low transitional probability and high information content) to conventional utterances (with the reverse characteristics):

63

MEANING CONTENT high

low

—low

Transitional probability

PROPERTIES

high — PROPERTIES

emotionally novel common conventional habitual ^

intense overlearned memorized reflex

t S * ' frequent famfliu i—*. i , I I greetings ι. ι ι ι Μ ι ι I rr\ lists I cliches songs social I schemata poems idioms expletives lines chatter semi-productive conventional formulas intrusions nursery vocal gesture expressions speech exclamations p , u s e fillers rhymes 7.

< ^ I

PROPOSITIONAL SPEECH MODES

AUTOMATIC SPEECH MODES

[Figure 2.1 Ά Hypothetical Continuum of Prepositional and Automatic Speech Modes and Their Properties' (Bolinger 1976:13, from Van Lancker 1974)] Bolinger suggests Collocations w o u l d be t h e a u t o m a t i c or s e m i - a u t o m a t i c s y n t a g m s t h a t c o n t i n u e to b e m o r e or less a u t o m a t i c even w h e n p a s s e d t h r o u g h t h e analytical sieve t h a t separates t h e m into their p a r t s a n d m a k e s p r e p o s i t i o n a l l a n g u a g e [ . . . ] possible. ( 1 9 7 6 : 1 3 )

Among the collocations he cites are glimmer of hope, perform good works and inclement weather, all taken to be examples of restricted collocations. 2.9 Pawley and Syder Pawley and Syder (1983) speak of hundreds and thousands of form /meaning pairings (which they call 'institutionalized sentence stems'), "a unit of clause length or longer whose grammatical form and lexical content is wholely or largely fixed" (191). In spontaneous conversation fluent native speakers draw on this stored stock of sentence stems and employ a 'one clause at a time' production faculty, to fully encode a whole clause of 8-10 words in a single operation, therefore relying heavily on memory rather than processing power, and allowing the speaker to concentrate on higher-order social aspects of communication and discourse planning. They, like Van Lancker (1974 ), envisage a continuum from novel creations ('nonce forms') to memorized sequences: the former being a minority. By far the largest part of a speaker's lexicon, in addition to memorized clauses and sentence stems, consists of complex lexical items, 'phraseological expressions' or 'lexicalized sentence stems'. Pawley and Syder draw a distinction between memorized sequences, which are part of native speakers' performance, and those which are lexicalized and components of competence. The latter are "less than a complete clause [...] [and] contain a nucleus of fixed lexical items standing in construction with one or more variable elements (often a grammatical inflection)" (1983:205), and which are used as standard labels for culturally recognized concepts. They use the term 'collocation' in a broader sense than that developed in Chapter One, in that a collocation is seen as a lexical nucleus within a larger and much more flexible syntactic framework. However, their concept of

64 lexicalized sentence stem clearly encompasses composite units as defined in Chapter One §1.3. For example, within the sentence stem 'NP tell - TENSE the truth' is the recognizable lexical collocation tell the truth. 2.10 Conclusion The initial goal of this chapter was to identify a psychological correlate for the conventionality of composite units and support for the view that they perform a significant communicative function. Sufficient evidence has been adduced that, far from being processed more slowly as a result of their semantic idiosyncrasy, idioms present no special problem for mental processes, and that the familiarity and fixedness of a sequence result in greater speed and ease of retrieval and comprehension. Fixed phrases of various kinds appear to be stored as wholes and employed in communication to increase fluency and allow the speaker/hearer to make full use of large memory capacity and reduce the demands on computation. Although much of the work of experimental psychologists has been done on idioms, both Bolinger and Pawley and Syder as well as Gibbs by implication extend the range of conventional lexical units which have psychological reality beyond idiomatic expressions to encompass the restricted collocations under discussion here. Having provided support for the significance of composite units as both linguistically and psychologically conventional, this study will proceed in the next chapter to a detailed examination of the language production of native speakers of English to discover how and to what extent such conventional forms are used in the real life of natural language use.

Chapter Three The Analysis of Native-speaker Academic Writing 3.0 Introduction In Chapter One it was shown that a framework can be devised for the description of composite units (those word combinations with a primarily prepositional function and realizing a wellformed syntactic pattern), and more specifically that a subset of those units, restricted collocations, display certain features that distinguish them in various significant ways from both free collocations and idioms. The components of the former (free collocations) enter into relatively free association with each other, attracted chiefly by complementary semantic and syntactic properties. The latter (idioms) form relatively frozen lexical complexes with severe restrictions on their lexical and syntactic variation. Restricted collocations, it was suggested, can be identified and described by means of the following formal criteria: • one component is used in a specialized sense; • there are to varying degrees limitations on the substitution of one element without affecting the meaning of the other. It would be useful at this point to recall the wide range of syntactic patterns realized by restricted collocations (verbal patterns are given the coding to be found in OALD (1989): Tn= Transitive verb + noun phrase direct object etc.): adj + n η + Prep η + adj binomial η " adj trinomial η " adj adv + adj adv + ν S +V V + 0 (+A) Tn Tn.pr Tn.p V+A Ipr

crying shame tissue of lies battle royal trial and error bloodied but unbowed lock, stock and barrel left, right and centre woefully inadequate richly deserve common sense prevails cast a vote serve notice on sb run up a bill resort to violence

The present study will be confined to an analysis of lexical collocations: in other words a combination of (typically) two lexical items belonging to open word classes (see the distinction made by Benson et al (1986a) between lexical and grammatical collocations §1.7.1). This classification rules out of consideration most particularly combinations of :

66 preposition and noun verb and preposition verb and particle

(e.g. in advance) (e.g. consist of) (e.g. take o f f )

However, these grammatical collocations may form part of larger collocational complexes. For example, the grammatical collocation due to circumstances may be most familiar and most frequently observed with an embedded lexical collocation in due to unforeseen circumstances. The verb + particle combination take up could be regarded as either a grammatical collocation or as a unitary verb; take up a position could then be viewed either as a complex combination of a grammatical and a lexical collocation: take up a position

or as a simple lexical collocation: take up a position

In either case it would be included in the analysis. The important point to make is that while such grammatical collocations would not qualify for consideration in their own right, they might be taken into account at the later stage of phraseological analysis. Chapter Two reviewed the evidence for a psychological motivation for this tendency for lexical items to combine into conventional and memorized complexes. Taking idiomatic expressions as extreme examples of such complexes, it was suggested that the processing of language is speeded up by words forming conventional patterns and thereby increasing the predictability of lexical sequences. It was hypothesized that what is true of idioms would be true, though to a lesser extent, of restricted collocations. Evidence was drawn from Pawley and Syder's (1983) examples of lexicalized sentence stems, which are conventional, though generally unidiomatic. 3.1 Phraseology in speech and writing These first two chapters make a case for the existence, as part of a speaker's linguistic competence, of lexical units larger than a word, stored in the mental lexicon and as readily available for production and comprehension as single words. It is perhaps natural to believe that this store is made use of most typically in spontaneous speech processing, when constraints of time would make the retrieval and manipulation of lexical complexes efficient for production and their predictability efficient for recognition and comprehension. Most of the studies of automatic language processing (e.g. Altenberg and Eeg-Olofsson 1990, Pawley 1988, Pawley and Syder 1983, Tannen 1989) have indeed focused on speech, especially on the role of memorized chunks of language in conversational discourse, while relatively little attention has been paid to préfabrication in writing. Several factors have conspired to give the impression that formulaic language is a feature of speech rather than writing. Firstly, as Pawley & Syder suggest, written text should not be taken as representative of the spoken language, either in regard to syntactic structure or in regard to the frequency of standard collocations as opposed to nonce forms. (1983:214)

67 Indeed, they see their phraseological studies as breaking away from the dependence of linguistics on descriptions of the language derived from written texts. For them the 'important research problems' in linguistics are to be found in spoken discourse and include the fluent production of speech and the 'psychological basis of fluency'. This necessarily results in an emphasis on spoken data. Furthermore, Van Lancker's 'Continuum of Prepositional and Automatic Speech Modes' (1974, reproduced in Bolinger 1976, see §2.8) displays categories of spoken expressions from novel social chatter, via formulas and clichés, to reflex cries and gestures, making no reference to automatic modes in written language. Secondly, pre-patterned language is seen as a primarily social construct, the significance of which is determined by appropriateness to the social context: "speech formulas and formulaic constructions are the meeting ground for many of the diverse conventions by which appropriateness or fitness of utterance is judged" (Pawley 1988:8). The appropriateness of an utterance is most commonly described in face-to-face spoken discourse. Thirdly, the psycholinguistic studies of conventional language referred to in Chapter Two are all based on the production, recognition and comprehension of speech. Again, the focus is on the spontaneous processing of language in 'real-time' in an attempt to reproduce natural interactive spoken language use in the laboratory. Additionally, it is natural to assume that the process of writing is psychologically more deliberate than speech production, allowing time for reflection and re-wording and resulting in the creation of novel lexical combinations. Most especially in the academic texts that this study is interested in, one might expect a writer not to have recourse to a stock of fixed expressions, since the academic community has a very finelytuned ear for cliché. That the above views of written language may be too limiting could result from misconceptions about the nature of both the writing process and prefabricated language: writing may be less 'creative' than is assumed; préfabrication may be less constraining. Even formal written styles may not be wholly creative: the expression of novel and stimulating ideas may be achieved through conventional forms (this important topic will be developed more fully in Chapter Four). Prefabricated language may not force the writer into a phraseological straitjacket: as Pawley says, "paradoxically, the commonplace speech formula seems to play a central role in the creative use of language"( 1988:4). Studies of the phraseology of written texts have mostly been carried out by means of the automatic analysis of large computer-based corpora (see Kjellmer 1984, 1990; Sinclair 1987a, 1991). Section §3.3.1 below discusses the reasons why the present approach does not rely on automatic analysis, though it should have become clear from the framework outlined in Chapter One that a great deal of detailed semantic, lexical and syntactic information is required, which is quite beyond the capability of present-day computer techniques. The empirical work that is most closely related to the present study has been done by Cowie (1991, 1992). This work has focused on the language of newspapers, examining quantitatively the degree of préfabrication in front-page news reports and leader articles. The method followed involves identifying all collocations realizing a particular syntactic pattern and calculating the proportion that could be regarded as restricted according to the criteria set out in Chapter One. The results show that both text types (news reports and feature articles) have a similar, surprisingly high, density of collocational restriction: between 40% and 50% of all transitive verb + direct object patterns. However, while the news reporter employs conventional patterns unmodified, the leader writer has the relative freedom from constraints of time and style to produce creative adaptations from the same stock of lexical complexes. In other words the greater amount of time for reflection results not in a much higher proportion of novel expressions or open collocations but in a greater degree of creative variation on established locutions. Cowie opens the door to widening still further the scope of such analysis:

68 Language containing a high proportion of familiar collocations in which one or more elements are fixed, or arbitrarily constrained, is not of course confined to journalistic prose. Ready-made units are no doubt an essential element in the neutral, educated 'mandarin' which broadcasters, teachers, academics, officials, and people in public life in general, need to control for very many communicative purposes. (Cowie 1991:113)

This assumption has to date barely been tested, a gap that this study aims partially to fill. In a pilot study for the present research a small-scale analysis of academic writing has been conducted (reported in Howarth 1993). This applies Cowie's analytical method to a limited body of text taken from a British academic journal (an article on ELT methodology of about 4,000 words). Of 193 VO(A) patterns in the text 34% could be classified as restricted. This can be regarded as a considerable proportion given the assumptions referred to above that are intuitively made about the process of composing academic prose. 3.1.1 Academic prose in the social sciences Both the small-scale study and the present large-scale analysis focus on the language of the social sciences, and, it will be remembered, chiefly from the perspective of non-native postgraduate students. The reasons for this are two-fold. Firstly, it could be claimed that, in the context of British university education, this variety poses greater problems for both native and non-native speakers in comprehension and production than does the language of the pure sciences (relatively few non-native postgraduates study arts subjects in the UK). Part of the difficulty presented by this style arises from the very great use of the lexis of everyday language in specialized senses, as semi-technical or technical vocabulary, and one level on which this use can be seen is collocational. For example, the verb assume might be familiar to a learner in its primary sense of 'accept as true', and a sentence such as We assumed that he was guilty would cause no difficulty. However, in a formal register the verb may as frequently be used in the sense of 'take on', (as in assume importance, a role, etc), a sense that may be restricted to the context of a few specifiable collocates, causing problems of overgeneralization in learners' writing and long-term difficulties in developing proficiency. Secondly, language training courses for non-native speakers in Britain (English for Academic Purposes, or EAP) make great use of texts drawn from this area (from academic journals, semi-technical magazines or newspaper feature articles), presumably because the subject matter is reasonably accessible to students of a broad range of disciplines. As a result, it is either directly or indirectly a very prominent variety for the overseas students who are the focus of this study. It is the aim of this third chapter to extend the preliminary study referred to above and to discover to what extent prefabricated patterns are a general feature of academic writing in the social sciences. In order to draw conclusions of value, it will be necessary to examine a sizeable body of academic texts. Such an approach inevitably raises serious questions about the composition of the corpus (its size and the selection of texts), the form in which it is available for analysis and methods for that analysis. 3.2 Corpus linguistics Leech has recently stated (1991) that The benefits of using machine-readable text corpora [...] are now so widely recognised that it is probably true to say that most text-based research makes use of a computerised corpus in one way or another. (2)

69 To put it another way, once computer technology has allowed text-based researchers to analyse larger and larger bodies of texts increasingly rapidly, they cannot then limit themselves entirely to a manual analysis of printed texts. Although the collection and analysis of corpora is not new (Quirk's Survey of English Usage was initiated in 1959), with the development of computational tools and their increasing availability since the 1960's corpus linguistics is today almost entirely identified with the analysis by computer of machine-readable texts. Three factors in particular have made the large-scale study of the phraseology of writing more feasible. Firstly, with optical scanners becoming affordable for individual researchers, it is now possible to convert large amounts of print into machine-readable form automatically. A representative corpus can therefore be devised to suit very specific research purposes. Secondly, the most easily available or collectable natural language corpora of a reasonable size are, of course, of written texts. The transformation of recorded speech into spoken corpora is still very laborious and few exist at present (see, for example, Altenberg 1990, 1993 on the London-Lund corpus of spoken English), though their development is recognized as a priority for progress in corpus linguistics (Leech 1991:22). Thirdly, computer software has been developed which can very rapidly identify recurrent patterns among words in large quantities of text. It is a fairly simple procedure to identify in the corpus and count all occurrences of a + ? + of for example, print out the immediate context of each occurrence, and to discover that a lot of occurs four times as often in a particular corpus as a bit of (from Renouf and Sinclair 1991). 3.2.1 Automatic collocational analysis The literature on corpus linguistics is far too extensive to review here, so this section will focus on only that part which relates directly to collocational studies. The largest amount of research work in this area has been done by Sinclair and others at the University of Birmingham, and this has produced a distinctive approach to collocational analysis, which has been very influential. The main characteristic of this approach is its emphasis on the notions of frequency and probability. Sinclair (1966) sets out the role of the computer in the development of a theory of lexis. His approach attempts to extend Firth's notion of'meaning by collocation' (discussed in §1.5.1), whereby the meaning of an individual word can very often only be stated in terms of the collocational relationships it establishes with other words. Sinclair considers that, in order to make strong assertions about the place of lexis in the linguistic system, it would be necessary to collect "a few thousand occurrences of (each) lexical item". Thus in any large-scale analysis of collocational meaning: "the 'formal' aspects of vocabulary organisation [...] are not likely to yield to anything less imposing than a very large computer" (410). The machine would be able to assemble very rapidly data about the immediate lexical environment (within a set 'span' or number of items on either side) of the item under investigation (or 'node'), and, with a sufficient corpus, identify those 'collocates' (the items occurring within the span) that were statistically significant. The overall frequency of an item in the text establishes the probability of its occurrence in the environment of the node, and significance is derived statistically from comparing the number of times a collocate appears within the span with its number of occurrences in the total text: "'significant' collocation is regular collocation between items, such that they occur more often than their respective frequencies and the length of the text in which they occur would predict" (Jones and Sinclair 1974:19). A group of such significant collocates is termed a 'cluster', and serves to define the lexical item under study.

70 Berry-Rogghe (1973) gives a detailed account of the procedure for calculating this measure of significance by means of the z-score, which has become one of the most commonly-quoted statistical measures of collocational significance. The formula is: z=(K-E)/VEq where Z: total number of words in the text A: a given node occurring in the text Fn times B: a collocate of A occurring in the text Fc times K: number of co-occurrences of Β and A S: span size, that is, the number of items on either side of the node considered as its environment p=Fc/(Z-Fn) (the probability of Β occurring at any place where A does not occur) E=p.Fn.S (expected number of co-occurrences) q=l-p The example is given of the node house and the calculation is made on the basis of a span of 3 words in a corpus of 71,595 running words. The following collocates are regarded as significant, assuming a statistically validated z-score minimum of 2.576:

sold commons decorate this empty buying painting opposite loves outside lived family remember full my into the has

z-score

Fc

24.0500 21.2416 19.9000 13.3937 11.9090 10.5970 10.5970 8.51926 6.4811 5.8626 5.6067 4.3744 3.9425 3.8209 3.6780 3.5792 3.2978 2.9359

7 4 3 252 7 4 4 6 10 12 13 20 26 25 271 92 2368 50

[Berry-Rogghe 1973:103-9] This notion of significance has been dominant in collocational studies based on computer corpora. Kjellmer (1982, 1984, 1987, 1990, 1994) has developed the Göteborg Corpus, which is a list of collocations extracted from the Brown Corpus of American (written) English (Kucera and Francis 1967). Abenberg and Eeg-Olofsson (1990) and Abenberg (1990, 1991) have begun a similar analysis of the London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English. However, these writers' approach differs from that of Sinclair in some important ways, which will be examined by means of Kjellmer's definition of collocation. For him, a collocation is

71 a sequence of words that occurs more than once in identical form and is grammatically wellstructured. (1987:133) This definition highlights some of the points of debate within the general approach and is worth examining in detail. A collocation is a 'sequence of words': two or more items must be adjacent in the text to be regarded as having a relationship. Sinclair (1991) places greater emphasis on co-occurrence within a span ("the usual measure of proximity is a maximum of four words intervening"(170)). The difference between the two is chiefly methodological, in that Kjellmer is interested (as are Altenberg and Eeg-Olofsson) in characterizing and measuring the 'collocational density' of whole texts, and searches computationally for all recurrent sequences of a given length (ie strings of 2, 3, 4 or more words: for example, a moment, in a moment, in the case of, at the beginning of the). Sinclair's interest, on the other hand, has been partly lexicographical and he therefore searches for recurrent items in proximity to pre-determined 'nodes' (see the discussion of back in Sinclair 1991). Both Kjellmer's and Sinclair's methods of searching fail to identify those collocational relationships that exist over much greater distances (a point recognized by Halliday (1966); see §1.5.2). This is a limitation accepted by Kjellmer (1982): it therefore frequently happens that what one feels ought to qualify as a collocation will not be included in the inventory, [...] because the sequence of elements of the potential collocation is broken by varying intervening elements. (32)

The view taken in the present study is that this limitation is largely the result of overdependence on computational methods; the theory has been constrained by the technology. In the analysis that follows, a number of discontinuous collocations, such as the following from a newspaper financial report, will be identified and included as far as possible: [...] the impact that opening up Heathrow to more foreign carriers, including American and United Airlines, and the Government's decision to hand some of its Tokyo slots to Virgin Atlantic would have on BA 's profits (Guardian: 13/11/91) It should be noted that neither Sinclair's approach nor Kjellmer's would identify this collocation. For Sinclair the intervening number of words would be too great, while for Kjellmer impact and have could only be regarded as a collocation if the combination recurred in a corpus along with the intervening 28 words verbatim. However, from the point of view of both the production and comprehension of that stretch of language have is clearly determined by impact. The reader would be able to predict the verb, since both reader and writer have access to the same combination stored in their lexicons. For the purposes of this study the above would therefore be counted as an instance of have an impact on sth. A collocation 'occurs more than once'. The requirement of recurrence forms the basis of the notion of collocational significance: "if a combination of words occurred more than once in the corpus, it was regarded as having met the frequency criterion" (Kjellmer 1982:26). Sinclair considers frequency of occurrence the feature that distinguishes significant from 'casual' collocations: the vital distinction between casual and significant collocation is [...] made according to the frequency of the collocates in several occurrences of an item. The more occurrences of an item we study, the clearer the picture will be; each particular casual collocate will be unlikely to occur again. (1966: 418)

72

Kjellmer's rather arbitrary and minimal criterion is justified on the grounds of the size of his corpus: "only very modest demands could be met in a one-million-word corpus" (ibid). A measure of frequency for both Kjellmer and Sinclair is the sole indication of collocational significance, since no analysis is made of the internal structure of any of the collocations identified computationally. This approach is highly dependent on large bodies of texts, since many individual co-occurrences will be infrequent: the larger the corpus of language, the stronger the claims that can be made, and the clearer the distinction will become between significant and 'casual' collocation. The focus of the present study is the significant role of conventional lexical units in language production, and the attempt was made in Chapter One to show that the linguistic correlate of significance is restrictedness. A significant collocation is one that possesses certain identifiable formal properties (such as restricted combinability), which result in its being only semi-analysed or completely unanalysed by language users. A native speaker's phraseological competence is established over many years, and familiarity with certain combinations is no doubt the result of recurrent encounters, though through exposure to an incalculable quantity of language. It is not possible to specify what language an individual speaker/hearer has been exposed to. Some composite units may become memorized after minimal exposure (as a result of highly distinctive lexical or grammatical properties, typical of such idioms as bell the cat), while others may need repeated encounters. Significance should not, therefore, be equated simply with recurrence. The consequence of possessing such properties as restricted commutability and semantic specialization may be that in any given text such combinations will recur, and that in ever larger corpora the commoner combinations will be observed more frequently. However, what is a significant collocation observed frequently in one corpus does not instantly become insignificant by appearing only once or fewer times than probability would predict in another. One of the chief advantages of the approach adopted here is that the significance of a word combination can be established and described within quite small texts. This latter view of significance comes closer to the psychological reality of a language community's relatively stable shared phraseological competence. While the statistically-validated significance of a collocation may vary from text to text and between corpora, communication depends on its conventionality being widespread within a community and constant. Significance is a property of collocations independent of any particular set of texts and suitable technology, and a speaker/hearer's knowledge of significant collocations is part of his/her competence, not just an observable fact of performance. In justification of the statistical approach to collocational significance it is claimed that the only alternative is a dependence on intuition. Sinclair, for example, is convinced that intuition has no place in descriptive studies when large corpora are available: "students of linguistics over many years have been urged to rely heavily on their intuitions and to prefer their intuitions to actual text where there was some discrepancy" (1991:4). There appear to be two fallacies in this rather over-stated position. The first is a question of quantity: can any corpus approach the collective linguistic experience of a language community? With corpora in excess of 1 billion words being created, the complete rejection of this quantitative argument becomes less secure, though to suggest that such a corpus is a complete reflection of a speech community's lexical knowledge still seems dubious. The second is a matter of quality. Greenbaum (1974) points out that collocation is more than a statistical matter: it has a psychological correlate [...] we know that items are collocated just as we know that one sequence of items is part of our language and another is not. Both constitute knowledge that speakers have of their language. (83)

73 It is relevant that Berry-Roggke uses intuition as support for her statistical formula: 'This formula has proved highly satisfactory in that it yielded a gradation among collocates which largely corresponded with our semantic intuitions" (1973:104). The debate can be seen from the point of view of both the presence and absence of a collocation in a corpus. Firstly, what conclusion would one draw from the absence in 'significant' numbers of a particular collocation (that a native speaker intuitively 'knows') from a corpus of whatever size? For example, in a corpus of 1 million words, there is no support for the collocation ulterior motive. Firstly, one could concede that it is in fact merely part of one's idiolect, secondly wait for a larger corpus to become available or, thirdly, have confidence in one's intuition. It would seem reasonable for at least some purposes to accept the intuitive judgement that the combination is familiar. In the opposite case the significance of the cooccurrence MAKE1 + alchemist (statistically significant in one of the corpora studied here) might be rejected on the basis of the corpus being too small or restricted, though one would only be alerted to the possible distortion by an initial intuitive reaction, suggesting that intuition must always play some part. Sinclair sets the data from a finite set of texts against the intuition of an individual (who may use elicitation methods to have access to the intuition of others) and dismisses the latter. However, to have absolute faith in either is limiting. The most productive course is to begin with no pre-determined philosophy and to employ data from both sources co-operatively. A collocation 'occurs more than once in identical form'. The strength of the computer in searching large corpora is that it will unerringly and at great speed locate all occurrences of a particular string of characters, or word forms. It scans swiftly over the surface of texts, but is unable to register much of what a human speaker of a language knows: the grammatical class of a word, its function in a syntactic structure or its meaning. It will therefore not differentiate between forms that humans would regard as having different syntactic functions (e.g. hold as a verb or a noun), but will distinguish between forms that humans would consider for some puiposes the same (hold, holds, holding, held). Recent advances in computational linguistics have made available corpora in which all word forms are given a 'tag' indicating word class, so it is possible to search for a particular verb form (e.g. the past participle held rather than the simple past tense). There are also parsing programs that will use these tags to construct syntactic trees. They are not widely available and most studies still rely heavily on surface identity for the measurement of recurrence. An important consequence of this insistence on formal identity is that variant forms of a given collocation are treated as different collocations (eg make a mistake, making mistakes and the many mistakes that have been made) and assigned individual statistical significance. There is no simple automatic way for the active and passive forms of a verb/noun collocation, for example, to be conflated. This deficiency may result in either the overestimating or underestimating of significance if judged by frequency of occurrence. Overestimation of frequency occurs in the case of isomorphic free and restricted collocations, such as put a question (meaning 'ask') and put a question (at the end of the questionnaire) and isomorphic restricted collocations and figurative idioms, such as take steps. In both cases each member of the pair is a different collocation-lexeme, and since the different categories represent differences of phraseological significance, the individual collocations should be given separate treatment. Underestimation occurs in the case of the examples above of MAKE + mistake. To

In this and the following chapters small capitals are used to indicate when verbs forms have been lemmatised for the purpose of searches of a corpus. In practice, however, it is not necessary to maintain this typological convention when presenting a large amount of data. In general small capitals are used in presenting lists of collocations and italics when commenting on examples.

74 give a true account of collocational behaviour, judgements have to be made by the researcher about whether two forms are of the same collocation. The focus therefore needs to be on cooccurrence on the lexemic level, not just on the level of surface word forms. A collocation is 'grammatically well-structured'. Kjellmer found early on in his analysis (1982) that some combinations were statistically 'significant', but "would not normally be called collocations"(25), for example although he, but too. He therefore found it necessary to add the criterion of well-formedness to that of frequency in the selection of his list. For Altenberg and Eeg-Olofsson (1990) the grammatical analysis follows the identification of word pairs. They apply a subsequent process of classification to those pairs selected on the basis of frequency alone. For Sinclair, however, (1991) "the attention is concentrated on lexical cooccurrence more or less independently of grammatical pattern" (170), thus bringing him close to Firth's separation of collocation from colligation. This disregarding of the grammatical relationship between collocates has already been argued against at length in Chapter One, §1.5.4. A related problem for a computational approach is the need to include pronouns as collocates of verbs. In χ called off a similar rally when they were refused permission to hold it the collocation hold a rally would be missed in a statistical analysis, not only on the grounds of proximity (with six words intervening) but also because the combination of surface forms is hold it. (The high frequency of it in the whole corpus makes its co-occurrence with hold statistically insignificant.) From the psycholinguistic standpoint of this study a native speaker encountering or producing this piece of text clearly has access to the stored collocation hold a rally. He or she does not store hold it in the lexicon (though the idiomatic functional expression hold it meaning 'stop' would be stored). The analysis presented in this chapter will therefore retrieve the antecedents of such object pronouns and treat them as the lexical collocates of the associated verbs. The question of regarding pronouns as equal to full nouns in collocations often arises in conjunction with discontinuous collocation across sentence boundaries: Carpenter is cautious in his presentations of these claims. He points out that Britten does not seem to make them to anyone else. Computational approaches are unable to recognize these combinations and are therefore incapable of identifying even all free collocations, let alone all restricted ones. It will have become plain that for the purposes of this study the pure form of a computational analysis depending on statistical significance is not appropriate. It will not automatically identify those structures in texts that are defined here as composite units. To achieve this, much of the analysis will have to be manual, working on the context of words in, at the minimum complete sentences. However, the argument is not against an empirical approach making use of corpus data, but against a reliance on measures of relative frequency derived from the automatic recognition of identical co-occurring forms. Having texts in machine-readable form means that sentences containing collocations of potential interest can be identified and printed out automatically from quite a sizeable corpus, and at the same time data of a more mechanical nature (frequencies, word lists, concordances etc.) can easily be produced. Nonetheless it will be necessary at all times to make use of the printed concordances from the texts in the corpus; very little analysis can be done on screen.

75 3.3 Corpus composition There is as yet no ready-made corpus of social science texts of British English. The closest and most easily available sub-corpus is the group of texts in the Lancaster/Oslo/ Bergen (LOB) Coipus of British English categorized as social science (in the following list J is the category of 'Learned and Scientific' texts): J22-35

Social, behavioural sciences

J22-25 J26-30 J31 J32-35

psychology sociology demography linguistics

(4 texts) (5 texts) ( 1 text) (4 texts)

J36-50 Political science, law, education J36-39 education J40-47 politics and economics J48-50 law

(4 texts) (8 texts) (3 texts)

These amount to 29 texts, of roughly 2000 words each, totalling therefore about 58,000 words. The advantage of this corpus is that the texts were gathered according to principles of balance and representation and can therefore be considered a fair sample of the register. A second major advantage is that a tagged version of the corpus is available, in which each word of the corpus is followed by a code of between 2 and 5 characters indicating grammatical class. For example five verb forms are identified thus: makeVB makes_VBZ making VBG made VBD made_VBN This enables a researcher to perform searches for words of a certain grammatical class and then use the resulting wordlists for further searches on the untagged corpus. It is not practicable to perform all searches on the tagged version, since the appearance of the texts with all words tagged hinders rapid analysis:

23 614 Λ at_RB first RB" the ATI child NN might MD lay VB a_AT long JJ rod_NN acrossIN the ATI tops NNS of_IN the ATI towersNNS to TO make VB sure JJ they PP3AS were BED level JJ ._. [liorizontal tagged LOB]

76 The same extract fom the untagged corpus is very much more legible and occupies much less space:

23 134 A At first the child might lay a long rod across the tops of the towers to make sure they were level. [untagged LOB] The main disadvantage of the LOB sub-corpus is its small size. With modern corpora approaching or even exceeding 100 million words, less than 60,000 seems trivial. Some supplementation was considered desirable, partly in order to show that the method of analysis could be applied to a more substantial body of texts and to discover what quantity of significant data would be generated. Corpus creation is not one of the objectives of this study nor is a comprehensive description of the register, rather the testing of hypotheses about prefabricated language against an adequate quantity of data. It did not seem necessary, therefore, to collect a balanced corpus of texts that would in some way be representative of the whole range of disciplines within the social sciences. It was thought adequate to attempt to collect as much material in machine-readable form as possible, without being too concerned about the resulting distribution of text types or subject matter. The availability of an optical scanner would have made possible the sampling of printed material and its conversion to machine-readable form; however, for much of the time that the corpus collection was taking place this facility was too unreliable to depend on. As an alternative, it was decided to approach those departments in the University of Leeds that most closely matched the categories of text in the LOB social science category, requesting texts on disk. The result was immediate, though limited in range. Texts were provided from three sources: 1. A collection of three papers by two authors from the Faculty of Law. 2. Seven chapters by six different authors from a book on language from the Overseas Education Unit, School of Education. 3. A complete book by a single author on child care from the Department of Social Policy and Sociology. These texts (totalling 180,000 words) were combined into a single corpus by means of a wordprocessor, and three corpora were eventually prepared for analysis, with a total number of approximately 240,000 words: The untagged LOB social science texts (LOBSS) The tagged LOB version (LOBHTSS) The Leeds University social science texts (LUSS) 3.3.1 Software Initial small-scale analyses of the LOB material were performed on a mainframe Amdahl computer, using the mainframe version of the Oxford Concordance Program (OCP). This is designed for fairly elaborate searches of large bodies of text (for example the complete LOB Corpus of 1 million words), and the results are produced in a file which if large is not easily

77 examined on the screen. The whole procedure is rather laborious and unsuitable for the researcher to use experimentally and to learn from quickly. Even on sub-sections of the LOB it is limited since one cannot rapidly and progressively refine a search or modify a display in the light of results obtained from a previous search. In contrast, TACT is software designed for interactive text retrieval on IBM-compatible PCs. It is shareware therefore freely available for research. It gives instant displays of the results of searches, which can be modified and refined easily and rapidly printed. The chief disadvantage is the limit on size. The manual states that beyond a file size of 200k processing becomes inconveniently slow, though this limit is easily overcome by linking a number of files together, and it seems that simple searches can be performed on files amounting to at least 3Mb. Problems arise when more complex searches are performed, when the physical limit of TACT's usable processing memory is soon reached. The benefit of accessibility was deemed to outweigh the limitation of size. It was therefore decided to transfer the social science section of the LOB corpus to PC format and prepare the text file for importing into TACT, and to do the same with the tagged version and the Leeds University texts. The LOB texts as stored on the mainframe have fixed-field references, ie each line of text begins with eight characters (including spaces) giving text category, text number and line number: J 23 99 "By means of graded exercises similar in type to those described for feet,...

The first part gives the text category letter (J), followed by the text number (23 indicating psychology) and line number. TACT cannot cope with such references, though it has a fairly sophisticated mechanism for dealing with other types of text references. It was therefore necessary to strip out the references from each line and replace the formatting in a different form. This was limited to inserting a label to indicate text identity, which could be printed out during corpus analysis. For LOB S S and LOBHTSS this label was simply the two-digit text number (22-50), and for LUSS an abbreviation of the author's name. The main TACT text retrieval program does not operate on the raw text files, but first converts them into a textual database (.TDB) file, and merges smaller databases into a single large file. During this phase there are opportunities to specify special characteristics of the alphabet used, references and text structure. At this point it was necessary to list a large number of symbols that LOB uses for marking special features of the text (e.g. formulae, foreign words etc.). A positive result of this tagging is that sentences can easily be recognized, since LOB signals the beginning of each sentence with [Λ], Paragraphs are also marked [|], though it was not thought useful or practicable to include that information. An unfortunate result of this was that several single sentence contexts from the legal texts (J48-50) were extremely long, since some 'sentences' contained 'paragraphs' within them. 3.4 Method The plan for the analysis was not rigidly set, since the advantage of the resources being used was that modifications would suggest themselves and could easily be made as the analysis proceeded. It was also recognized that different categories of collocation might require different methods (for example, searching for adjective + noun combinations might pose different problems for the software from verb + noun on the basis of proximity). Different tasks might be better done with either OCP or TACT.

78 The first step (following Cowie 1988, 1992 and Howarth 1993) was to select a structural pattern to describe. The wide range of possible patterns realized by lexical collocations has been presented in §3.0. It was thought desirable for this study to provide a point of comparison with existing empirical research, in the hope of contributing to an increasing body of phraseological description. It was therefore decided to focus attention on verb + noun collocations, by examining all structures in which the verb and noun classes are represented. Other patterns could be considered once a substantial amount of data had been accumulated. However, it became clear once the analysis of the verb + object noun patterns in the LOBSS corpus was complete that a very large amount of data would be generated, which would take a great deal of time to process. These patterns are clearly central in clause structure, since in language production it is in the predicate that the propositional content of the clause is expressed. It was deemed sufficient to limit the data to verb + noun collocations and to ignore the remainder. It is widely held that in language production the noun in English (where present in a phrase or clause) is the starting point (or 'base') for the selection of lexical words of other classes (especially verbs and adjectives) (see Benson 1989, Hausmann 1979 and Dzierzanowska and Koztowska 1988). This might suggest the need to focus the searches on the noun and, for each one identified, retrieve its verb collocates. However, this approach would capture patterns of too many other structural types (adjective + noun, prepositional phrase, subject + verb) to be collected and then immediately discarded, whereas searches based on the verb would more sharply focus the searches on the desired patterns. 3.4.1 Preparation of the data Since the LOB Corpus is 'balanced', it was thought that the results of analysing those texts could be used as a basis for the analysis of LUSS. Initially, the tagged LOB corpus was used to establish a verb list with which searches of the standard version could be made. This was done through OCP on the mainframe by requesting a wordlist of all words with a verbal tag: VB (base form), VBD (past tense), VBG (present participle, gerund), VBN (past participle) or VBZ (3rd person singular). Each tag is attached to its word form by means of an underscore . By using wildcards, the search specification for all verb forms is reduced to: *_VB* (where * represents any string of characters including none). The result was an alphabetical list of 1842 different verb form types, followed by their grammatical tag and the number of occurrences in the corpus: a total of 4991 tokens. The first three and the last three lines are reproduced here, with their respective frequencies: abandon_VB

1

abandoned VBN

2

abandoning_VBG

1

yieldVB

1

yielding_VBG

1

yieldsVBZ

1

It is important to note that these tags identify only full verbs and exclude modal auxiliaries and all forms of BE. All forms of HAVE and DO, apart from doing and done (since they are not used in an auxiliary function) are tagged separately in LOBHTSS (as have HV, has HVZ, do DO, does DOZ etc). While HAVE and DO were later added in to the total, BE was omitted entirely.

79 Three things needed to be done to this list. Firstly it needed lemmatization, with the frequencies added up for each lemma; secondly, the tag needed to be removed; and thirdly, the list needed to be sorted into frequency order. The file was first transferred from the mainframe to a PC and the first of the tasks was performed rather laboriously by hand with a word processor. The second was performed automatically by means of a Search and Replace facility: each occurrence of '_VB' etc. was replaced with a comma. This procedure resulted in each line being separated into two fields: a word and a number, enabling the third task to be performed by the Sort facility, which can be instructed to sort a list numerically by the second field in each line. A few modifications had to be made manually: for instance, HAVE and DO had to be added; the totals for these two verbs included here exclude their uses as auxiliary verbs. The final result looked like this: have, make. use,

149 129 103

witnesseth, wondered, wrecking,

1 1 1

(single instances of word forms are here left in the original unlemmatized form). At the end of this process the original 1842 verb forms had been reduced to 881 lemmas, with a total of 5154 occurrences (the increase from the 4991 occurrences given above was due to the addition of HAVE and DO). It was not considered feasible to identify the noun collocates of all the verbs in the list, and for very many too few instances were available for analysis, so a decision had to be taken concerning the sampling of data from this raw total. The first decision was to base the sampling method on the smaller LOB SS and to replicate that procedure in the searches of the larger LUSS. A balance needed to be struck between producing a sample that would remain representative of the lexical composition of the complete corpus and identifying a realistic quantity of material for analysis. Frequency of occurrence of verb lemmas appeared to provide the most easily implemented method of sampling, though it is admitted that this approach introduces a bias. On the one hand this might give undue prominence to the heavy-duty verbs (such as have, make and take) discussed in §1.7.3.2, which in their delexical uses are likely to form restricted collocations. This might bias the numerical results of the analysis and inflate the percentage of restricted collocations. However, these verbs would dominate in almost any sample from a corpus. On the other hand, the result of excluding from consideration large numbers of low-frequency verbs is harder to calculate. Within that list there are some that would clearly be of interest. The verbs adopt (a policy), implement (a plan) and play (a role) are all commonly found in restricted collocations in academic writing, though they occur infrequently in LOBSS. It could be that the semantic specialization of some verbs coincides with low frequency (eg amortise, attenuate, expend and promulgate all have single occurrences) and that they would be found in restricted collocations. In contrast, it will be seen in the later analysis that some of the highest frequency verbs in the corpora are found in few, if any restricted collocations (eg consider, discuss and include). It is therefore not possible to gauge the extent of any bias introduced by using frequency as a sampling criterion, though it is admitted that this reduces the validity of the quantitative results. The use of frequency for sampling from data is, of course, quite distinct from its use as an indication of linguistic significance.

80 A method of sampling on the basis of frequency of occurrence was adopted for practical rather than theoretical reasons, and an initial cut-off of 10 occurrences was imposed. This gave the following figures: of the 881 lemmas, 745 had a frequency of 9 occurrences or fewer, accounting for a total of 1937 instances. Although representing a small proportion of all verb lemmas (15%), the most frequent 136 lemmas (with 10 occurrences or more) accounted for more than half of the occurrences of all the verb forms: frequency ICH- occurrences 9- occurrences total

lemmas 136 745 881

% 15.4 84.5 100

occurrences 3217 1937 5154

% 62.4 37.6 100

[Table 3.1: Occurrences of verb lemmas in LOB J22-50] This cut-off point produced a manageable number of verbs to be investigated, while achieving coverage of a majority of the total tokens (62%). This master verb list was used as the basis for searches of the untagged LOB sub-corpus, LOBSS. This was done through TACT on a stand-alone PC. The untagged LOB, of course, can only give automatic access to word forms, so the initial index of a particular verb was edited on screen to remove non-verbal uses (eg hold as a noun or considering as a preposition or conjunction) and auxiliary uses of HAVE and DO, the master verb list from the parallel LOBHTSS being used as a check. It was possible to switch rapidly between the two databases on screen to verify doubtful cases of morphological analysis (occasional errors in the tagged LOB were identified, resulting in minor alterations to the totals given above). This edited list was then displayed in one of three main display formats available: Index, KWIC (Key Word In Context) and Text: Index develop (6) 23 9 |importance in helping the child to 29 204 which they wished the | school to 32 45 of this investigation has been to 43 49 risking the inflation | that might 46 135 I experience to enable them to 46 16S purpose of this article is to

>develop his concepts of space, >develop, 70 per \0cent. showed >develop in more | detail the >develop once recovery was well >develop efficient cotton >develop a simple aggregative |

KWIC develop (6) |AWhile experience and general cultural opportunities are of great importance in helping the child to develop his concepts of space, it must not be forgotten that genetic causes, and temperament, play important roles too, especially the former. 23 9 O u t of the 77 parents in Area A who gave such particulars of the attitudes, virtues, and qualities of personality which they wished the school to develop, 70 per \0cent. showed a concern for various forms of unruly or anti-social behaviour.

*# 2021

81 Text | A While experience and general cultural opportunities are of great importance in helping the child to develop his concepts of space, it must not be forgotten that genetic causes, and temperament, play important roles too, especially the former. AIt has long been known that ability to manipulate shapes in the mind is present by 10-12 years of age, independent of measured intelligence. A Further, girls possess this ability to a lesser degree than boys, and it is likely that their inferiority in this respect is in part due to the differing kinds of activities in which they engage. AIt was suggested, too, by El Koussy in 1935, that the ability depended on the capacity of the individual to obtain, and the facility to utilize, visual spatial imagery. AE1 Koussy's point of view has recently received a little support from the work of Stewart and Macfarlane Smith (1959) using the electroencephalograph. APiaget would certainly admit that imagery supports spatial reasoning and geometrical thought, but is not in itself sufficient. 23 9

Technically speaking, TACT's Index display is closer to what is usually regarded as KWIC, which is a single screen line for each occurrence of the key word, aligned in the centre, with the rest of the line filled out with the context on either side of the key word. What TACT calls a KWIC concordance has the greatest flexibility in manipulating the amount of context displayed. This was modified so that the key word was embedded in a single complete grammatical sentence. Each instance was labelled with the text and line number. The resulting display was saved as a file on disk and printed out. The printout (similar to the KWIC display above) was used for manual identification of relevant data. At times it was necessary to return to the database to retrieve the antecedents of pronouns or disambiguate homonyms. This was made very straightforward by the reference numbers, since it was possible to switch from the KWIC or Index to the Text display to provide the required context. The same list of verbs derived from the LOB corpus was later used to produce concordances from the larger LUSS corpus. 3.4.2 Verb patterns The manual analysis of the printed data (the results of the searches of the computer corpus) began with the identification of the verb pattern entered into by the key word (verb) in each printed sentence. The verb pattern scheme in the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (OALD 1989) was used to identify and classify those verbs and their complementations which could be regarded as verb + object noun collocations (ie transitive constructions): Tn make progress Tn.p make up the leeway Tn.pr take sth into account / take account of sth Dn.n give sb notice Dn.pr give preference to sb It will be noticed that the Tn.pr pattern may be realized by a collocational relationship between the verb and either the direct object or the prepositional object, though in both cases above the strongest bond is with account. In the double-transitive patterns, the strong collocational link is between the verb and the direct object. In the case of some verbs, such as give, the same noun collocate is found in both Tn and Dn.n/Dn.pr patterns (give (sb) the impression). Tn.p patterns are a special case. It was pointed out in §3.0 above that instances such take up a position are of interest to this analysis for the lexical collocation existing between take up (regarded as a grammatical collocation and an idiom in its own right) and position. It is this relationship that is considered for the purposes of collocational categorization.

82

At an early stage in the analysis it was noticed that the focus on transitive verb + object noun collocations excluded many combinations of other patterns consisting of verb + lexical complementation that were of equal significance for this study. These included: Ipr Ip.pr It La Cn.n Cn.a Cn.i binomial

come come come come make make make come

to a conclusion in for praise to pass close to doing sth it a point to do sth sth clear ends meet and go

Ipr and Ip.pr are particularly problematic for the method of analysis adopted here. By omitting from consideration all instances of intransitive constructions (including Ipr) there is a danger of overlooking prepositional verbs such as allow for, come across or look after, which, in addition to being idioms in themselves, have the potential to form restricted collocations with their prepositional objects. However, in the analytical procedure set out in Chapter One the syntactic classification precedes any lexical or collocational analysis. Although it could be claimed that in the special case of prepositional verbs the syntactic analysis cannot be separated from the semantic, it was considered necessary to exclude all Ipr constructions rather than make judgements at an initial stage about the lexical significance of this single class. Furthermore, it could also be claimed that by including prepositional verbs as a special case, instances were being selected that were more likely to be conventional (thereby biasing the analysis). The possibility was considered of widening the scope to include all lexical complements (adjective, noun and in some cases verb) of all classes of verb. However, the analytical framework elaborated in Chapter One has been developed using the verb + object noun pattern as the central case, and it is not clear how this would be extended to other patterns. In time this may prove feasible, but for the present study it seems unproductive to complicate the analysis unnecessarily. A further category of collocations, recognized by collocational dictionaries (such as BBI and SEC, see §3.4.4 below), though excluded from the present analysis, are Subject + Verb combinations: The difference lay essentially in reports [...] where the limit lies 3.4.3 Exclusions and additions In order to focus more precisely on those combinations that exemplify lexical collocations, it was necessary to exclude from the analysis the following categories of occurrence: • indefinite nominal complements (often pronouns with clause antecedents) [...] or shew how this should be done • references (mostly with the verb SEE) [...] (seeprinciple 4 below) • numbers [...] unemployment probably reached 10% by the late 1970s

83 • imprecision of reference Awareness of child sexual abuse expanded, partly influenced by greater openness [...] (Here it is hard to pin down the direct object of influenced.) This will constitute our frame of reference for the discussion of civil service English which we shall subsequently consider in terms of [...] (Is it the frame of reference or civil service English that is being considered?) • grammatical collocations (a miscellaneous category, partly excluded by the verb pattern criterion) Holt, as will be shown later, is critical [...] (This could be regarded as a functional expression, and that phraseological type tends in this corpus to be associated with certain verbs such as find, note, point, see, used in similar constructions and typical of academic discourse. This category would merit a separate study.) On the other hand, two categories of occurrence swelled the numbers: • co-ordinated complements [...] qualifying comment or reasons given Two separate collocations would be classified here: give a comment and give a reason. • pronouns with lexical antecedents Indeed, the slow, deliberate progress that it had made since its inception in 1952 suggests that its coinciding with a recession was fortuitous, though had there been inflation serious enough to make any tax reduction undesirable it could presumably have been held over for a year or so. The object of held over is it, which probably refers to tax reduction. The first it in the sentence (which from the previous sentence is found to refer to tax bill) appears to be distinct. This occurrence is then regarded as a combination of HOLD + over + tax reduction. The result of these exclusions and additions is a body of lexical collocations, and it is on the total thus derived that the later numerical calculation are based (rather than on the original raw total). 3.4.4 Support from published authorities The criteria for recognizing restricted collocations, figurative idioms and pure idioms have been set out in Chapter One. Making the distinction between restricted collocations and idioms is considerably aided by the fact that the identification of idioms of both kinds is relatively straightforward: the semantic opacity of an expression or its unitary figurative sense is not generally controversial and has been the subject of a considerable body of literature (see §1.4). There are, additionally, a large number of dictionaries of idioms which between them cover a comprehensive range. The Oxford Dictionary of Current Idiomatic English (ODCIE vols 1 and 2: Cowie and Mackin 1993 and Cowie et al 1983) among others was used. The distinction between restricted collocations and free collocations, on the other hand, posed severe problems and was one of the greatest challenges for this study. In addition to the analytical criteria, some support is to be found from the very few collocational dictionaries at present available:

84 The BBI Combinatory Dictionary of English, Benson, Benson and Dson 1986a Selected English Collocations, Dzierzanowska and Koziowska 1982/1988 Both (henceforth BBI and SEC) list under noun headwords the verb collocates (with separate sub-sections for the noun as subject and object). Both additionally list adjective collocates, and BBI provides many grammatical collocates (especially prepositions) in noun, verb and adjective entries. An additional more specialist source is Spencer (1975) Noun-verb Expressions in Legal English, though it was of limited use in this study, since the legal texts represent only three out of forty in the two corpora. Reference can also be made to general learner's dictionaries such as LDOCE and OALD, which include a large number of idioms and fixed expressions. None was treated as a final authority during analysis, but they were used to confirm the results of applying the analytical criteria. Chapter Five discusses the value of these reference works in detail. 3.5 Analysis The results of the data analysis that follow are both quantitative (indicating the numbers and proportions of collocations in the various categories) and qualitative (describing the semantic, collocational and syntactic properties of the phenomena under investigation). It will be clear from the discussion above that the emphasis of this study is on qualitative description rather than quantitative measurement. With an interest in the underlying psychological reality of the phenomena, the study places no great faith in differences in mere frequency of occurrence in a corpus. However, some account must be taken of the numerical findings, since the measure of collocational density of a group of texts (expressed as a percentage) provides a potential basis for comparison within this study and with other pieces of research and helps to establish norms for future work. The following analysis is organized according to the chronological stages in the process of classification summarized in §1.8: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

syntactic pattern institutionalization semantic specialization restriction on commutability semantic unity motivation

The end result is a classification of collocations into the three major phraseological types: free collocations, restricted collocations and idioms. Additionally, restricted collocations are subdivided into degrees of restrictedness as explained in §1.7.4.2. Numerical data isintroduced where appropriate. 3.6 Syntactic patterns It was stated in §3.4.1 that a cut-off point of >10 occurrences was imposed, and that this produced an initial list of 136 verb lemmas derived from the tagged LOB corpus. This was used as the basis for the first stage of manual analysis: the assigning of instances to syntactic patterns. The focus was then narrowed to those five verb patterns listed in §3.4.2:

85

Τη Τη.ρ Tn.pr Eton Dn.pr Once the additional limitation was imposed of a verb having to occur at least ten times in one or more of those patterns in both corpora, that list was reduced to 63 verbs with a total number of occurrences in the two corpora of 5379. This total represents, therefore, a body of more than five thousand lexical collocations to which the analytical criteria were applied for their classification into collocational types. The full list of verbs is as follows, with the total number of occurrences in the two corpora: verb accept affect apply associate assume base bring build carry compare consider contain create define describe determine discuss do draw emphasize establish

total 63 52 43 48 30 77 96 30 86 36 108 51 87 56 60 44 122 59 48 58 62

express find follow form get give have hold include increase influence introduce involve justify know maintain make mention obtain pay place

60 165 56 44 31 304 604 44 102 27 39 30 77 51 33 59 369 52 63 53 66

prefer produce provide publish put reach receive reduce reflect reject represent require see set show spend suggest support take understand use total

26 65 168 46 72 35 41 54 73 27 61 100 80 66 85 28 28 92 279 33 275 5379

[Table 3.2 Highest frequency verb lemmas in LOBSS and LUSS: alphabetical order]

86

The same list of verbs follows in frequency order: verb have make give take use provide find discuss consider include require bring support create carry show see base involve reflect put

total 604 369 304 279 275 168 165 122 108 102 100 96 92 87 86 85 80 77 77 73 72

place set produce accept obtain establish represent describe express do maintain emphasize define follow reduce pay affect mention contain justify associate

66 66 65 63 63 62 61 60 60 59 59 58 56 56 54 53 52 52 51 51 48

draw publish determine form hold apply receive influence compare reach know understand get assume build introduce spend suggest increase reject prefer total

48 46 44 44 44 43 41 39 36 35 33 33 31 30 30 30 28 28 27 27 26 5379

[Table 3.3 Highest frequency verb lemmas in LOBSS and LUSS: frequency order] 3.6.1 Issues in the identification of verb patterns In the initial assignment of verbal pattern to the raw printed data, two problems arose. The first affected whether the instance would be included in the analysis (ie whether it was a realization of one of the five verb patterns), the other resulted from uncertainty over which of those patterns it belonged to. In an appreciable number of cases at first sight the surface co-occurrence of two forms was open to two syntactic or semantic interpretations. In some cases the difficulty arose from a pronoun's doubtful reference: But as I understand it, the phrase has always described the old trade union principle a fitter must not take less than the fitter's rate, nor a compositor than the compositor's Does it refer specifically to phrase, in which the case the collocation is understand a phrase, or to a larger preceding unit, for example a whole clause or sentence? The preceding sentence seems to confirm that it is phrase that is referred to grammatically (and this is the judgement made here), though it is not clear exactly what the phrase is: They do not state what the principle is, but they say that 'it relies for its operation very largely on a judgement of the constable's value to the community '.

87 In other cases the doubt arises within a smaller context: Consider factors to be taken into account. Here the verb consider could be seen as part of a Cn.t construction: consider sth to be (the verb is found in one of the complex-transitive patterns in about 15% of cases in the corpora), or to be taken into account could be the post-modification of factors, in which the pattern would be Tn (as it is taken to be here). Whether the syntactic pattern is Tn or Cn.t determines its inclusion or exclusion from the analysis. The following extract illustrates a more significant difference: Such examples show that, in the settlement of salaries and wages, men are willing to neglect many differences between jobs, and also to recognize others as important. In this case recognize + differences, as Tn, might have been of interest collocationally, but followed by as important it is clearly Cn.a, which changes its collocational complexión (this verb was excluded from the final list since there were too few instances of its use in Tn patterns). In other cases there is a marked difference between two occurrences of a combination: We can, however, find some evidence on this point. Trier himself, judging by his various qualifications and his references to 'transition states ' found the evidence less clear-cut than he might have desired. The important points to make here are firstly that the forms and degrees of lexical dependency between elements in a combination are often inseparable from their syntactic relationships, and secondly that this provides yet more evidence against dependence on automatic recognition of co-occurrence. If lemmatized automatically, the last two instances would both have been counted as occurrences of FIND + evidence (being within the required span), whereas it is clear that lexico-grammatically they are quite distinct. Having eliminated all but the five major patterns, the chief difficulty involved deciding between the two most common: Tn and Tn.pr: [...] individual cases cannot be used to provide evidence for this perspective Education must be provided for those children who choose it. [...] it was also required to provide for the needs of a mechanical [...] engineer Of these three surface instances of the co-occurrence of PROVIDE + for and a noun, the third can easily be classified as Ipr (and excluded), but the difference between provide evidence for sth and provide education for sb exemplifies the frequent difficulty encountered of deciding to what extent the prepositional phrase is an integral part of the meaning of the head verb. The line taken in this study was to consider the connection as a cline involving subjective judgement in some cases, though ultimately the decision did not make an appreciable difference to the outcome of the collocational analysis. Reference to OALD and ODCEE was of great assistance in many cases, though not all. In the examples above provide evidence for was classed as Tn (the prepositional phrase being deemed to complement evidence), while provide education for was classed as Tn.pr.

88

Almost as frequently there was some uncertainty as to what the precise collocate of a verb was. In many cases this was due to the presence of a postmodified noun in a noun + of + noun construction: This parallelism between the general states of affairs known by an interchangeable knowing subject implies the transparency of language. the concept of psychological parenthood is emphasised Science, [...] requires an unusually meticulous mode of expression. [...] they had all demonstrated a basic level of language proficiency. In the first two cases one can safely classify the occurrences as collocational relationships between KNOW + state of affairs and EMPHASIZE + concept. In the second it could be argued that semantically it is parenthood that is emphasized, and this is perhaps another aspect of the insistence on collocation as a lexico-grammatical relationship. However, in the third and fourth it is arguable whether the collocational relationship exists between REQUIRE and mode or REQUIRE and expression, between DEMONSTRATE and level or proficiency. The answer is not clear, though on balance one would have to take the head of the noun phrase (mode and level) as the primary collocate on syntactic grounds. Similarly, there are nouns premodified by attributive nouns where there is doubt about the collocational relationship: [...] the career path he/she might follow once in the workforce; Here a confusion is caused by there being two possible familiar collocations: follow a career and follow a path (though neither appears in either BBI or SEC). In this case one could decide that it is the head of the noun phrase, path, that determines or motivates the verb follow. A solution to the problem posed by the above examples is to regard the head + modifier (mode of expression) and modifier + head (career path) combinations as collocations with which the verb collocates as a whole. In the following example, however, it could be claimed that it is the premodifying noun role that determines the verb ASSUME rather than the head relationship, though, again, on syntactic grounds the collocate is the head. An alternative interpretation is that it is an example of a nonstandard combination (discussed in §3.13 below): Even when he is communicating through letters with his colleagues, it is the same role relationship that he assumes. With one verb in particular, BASE, which in the corpora only occurs in Tn.pr pattern (base sth on sth), there is a problem over whether the collocate is the direct object or the prepositional complement: It is this infrastructure and not the correspondence with a no longer existing historical reality on which decisions regarding the acceptability of the historiographical constructions produced by historians are based. This can be reduced to the pattern: base decisions on infrastructure, in which the verb BASE would seem to be determined by the direct object decisions, though neither dictionary gives any verb having that kind of semantic relationship with decision. However, in the following

89 occurrence of BASE the stronger relationship seems to exist between BASE and the prepositional complement evidence: This explanation of[...] is based on sound physiological evidence and is so simple that it seems highly convincing. In both cases the stronger collocational tie seems to be with the prepositional phrase rather than with the direct object. 3.6.2 Verb pattern results The following table presents the verb + object noun patterns identified, with the totals for the two corpora added and in frequency order: verb pattern Tn

occurrences 4116

Tn.pr

850

Tn.p

245

Dn.n

93

Dn.pr

75

total

5379

[Table 3.4 Total number of occurrences of verb patterns in LOBSS and LUSS] In commenting on these figures, two points can be made in comparing these patterns with those excluded from the analysis and in making comparisons among the above totals. Firstly, the original 136 verbs used as the basis of the syntactic analysis produced more than eight thousand (8121) occurrences in both corpora of all patterns2 that might conceivably have been realized by lexical collocates. The imposition of the minimum number of verb occurrences and structural patterns reduced this total to 63 verbs and five patterns, while maintaining a coverage of 66% of the original data. Secondly, it is apparent that the simple Tn pattern dominates the data, with 77% of the occurrences in the more limited data and nearly 60% in the original. This appears to be a usefid finding, since it suggests that for the purposes of collocational analysis one is justified in placing primary emphasis on the relationship between verbs and their direct objects. The reality of language production provides support for this as the dominant structural pattern among verbs with complementation. Establishing the syntactic foundation for the analysis, though a prerequisite for identifying well-formed collocations, does not contribute to distinguishing between phraseological categories, although a potential by-product of this criterion could be the identification of asyntactic idioms {blow to kingdom come, for example).3 A second by-product is the

2

Nearly thirty distinct patterns were identified, ranging from high frequency structures such as Cn.n, Cn.a and Ipr with more than 100 occurrences each, to very low frequency patterns such as Ip.t, Tn.g and Tn.p.pr. None of this type has been encountered here, though this approach could be extended to attempting a correlation between the low frequency of occurrence of a pattern (eg Ip.t) and the collocational restrictedness of its realisations.

90 recognition of deviant combinations. This is the topic of a later section in this chapter (§3.13), though it is clear that deviation from syntactic norms (rather than collocational expectations) is likely to be interpreted as random performance error. 3.7 Institutionalization We now move on to the second criterion, which, as was suggested in §1.7.2, requires little comment. The main function of this criterion is to distinguish between the most banal combinations, which can immediately be classified as free collocations, and those which are institutionalized and therefore at least potentially restricted, thus requiring further analysis. Its secondary purpose is to identify nonce forms which could be regarded as deviations from collocational norms. The banal are, of course, not the predictable (a distinction relevant to the discussion of clichés in §1.2): pay tax, spend money and publish a book are predictable from knowledge of the meaning of each element (assisted by knowledge of the world), and would be regarded as institutionalized by virtue of their being the generally accepted way of referring to a recurrent event (see Pawley 1985a). In the present analysis they are not regarded as restricted. Non-institutionalized forms can be divided into three categories: • Free collocations, such as represent specifications and reflect confrontation, which can be generated by means of normal syntactic and semantic rules when the need arises. There is no need for them to be stored since they do not represent a conventional form/meaning pairing that members of a community re-use. • Creative variants, of which, as one would expect, there are almost no examples in this data. • Non-standard collocations, such as pay care. Naturally, the vast majority belong to the first category. The last two will be discussed in §3.13 below. It must be recognized that the criterion of institutionalization cannot be described with precision and is largely an intuitive measure. Its contribution to phraseological categorization is as a preliminary filter, which can be applied in general terms without putting at risk the subsequent detailed analysis. There is more likelihood of the criterion being applied too liberally (admitting combinations to the next stage that later prove to be free) than too strictly (dismissing too soon those that by further analysis would be classed as restricted). 3.8 Semantic specialization This stage in the procedure represents the first major step in the analysis of the complex central area of the phraseological continuum The criterion of semantic specialization was introduced in some detail in §1.7.3, where it was emphasized that its focus (in the case of non-idiomatic combinations) is on the meanings of the component parts and the relationships between them. Further, it was suggested that in the initial examination of this feature, it is the nature of the verb (in verb + object noun collocations) that is of most interest.

91 There are, it was claimed, three possible manifestations of the semantic specialization of a verb: • a figurative sense • a technical sense • a delexical sense. The following sections will first examine clear examples of a lack of semantic specialization in the verb, in which case the collocation can be classified as free. However, it is important to bear in mind that, in general, specialization in the meaning of the verb is not a sufficient requirement for collocational restrictedness. The further criterion of limited collocability is needed to establish phraseological status. 3.8.1 Literal meaning The first group of collocations to be examined are those in which the verb is used in its literal sense. There are among the 63 verbs used in this part of the study a significant proportion, nearly a third, which are used only in their literal senses. The number of occurrences of these 20 verbs represents 20% of the total: affect associate compare contain define describe discuss emphasize include increase influence

52 48 36 51 56 60 122 58 102 27 39

involve justify know mention prefer reduce represent suggest understand total

77 51 33 52 26 54 61 28 33 1066

[Table 3.5 Verb lemmas occurring in LOBSS and LUSS only in literal senses] Most of these verbs, it can be seen from a dictionary, do not have well-defined figurative extensions of the primary meanings: compare, emphasize or influence. They are used in senses that are fully transparent in academic writing, and can be seen to collocate with a very wide range of nouns: COMPARE EMPHASIZE INFLUENCE

behaviour, levels, results, size etc. (30 different collocations in 36 occurrences) autonomy, concept, link, rights, strength, treatment etc. (39 different collocations in 58 occurrences) content, culture, groups, people, values etc. (30 collocations in 39 occurrences)

Some do have figurative meanings that are not found in the texts examined here: contain ('keep within limits'), describe ('draw a geometrical figure') and reduce ('lower in rank'). Others have highly specialized senses associated with specific collocates that again are not represented in this data: mention a case or prefer charges. Occurrences of these 20 verbs

92 (found here only in free collocations) account for 33% of all the free collocations in the data. Although these occurrences need no further consideration in the analytical framework, this sample of verbs might be seen as a useful list of those that are typically used to form collocations through compositional, generative mechanisms: ie are typically non-phraseological in their behaviour. More comparative studies would be needed, but findings of this kind could have relevance to vocabulary acquisition studies. 3.8.2 Technical meaning Of all aspects of semantic specialization, the technical restriction of verbs is in theory the most clear-cut, though in practice even here there are shades of meaning and gradations in technicality. One source of evidence for the identification of this category is the labelling in dictionaries of technical uses of words. These are commonly associated with technical terms that are only used in one specialized sense, but these tend to be nouns. Examples of words with a technical style label from the Detailed Guide of the OALD, for example, are all nouns: basilica, bastardy, chiaroscuro, continuity, cursor and subjunctive. The technical senses of verbs, on the other hand, tend either to be denominal neologisms (especially in fields such as computing and management: output, interface or outplace) or subsenses of verbs from the core vocabulary not labelled as technical in the dictionary. In some cases the verb + noun collocation seems sufficiently tied to a specific sub-sense of the verb and to a defined register to be regarded as technical: for instance carry a motion from political discourse. In many cases, however, the sense of the verb is not distinct from its use in other contexts, but its co-occurrence with a particular noun is restricted to a specific field: eg receive Royal Assent from the LOB category of law texts (J50). The following is a list of those occurrences of the selected verbs identified as forming technical collocations in the two corpora. The number is small enough (a total of 63 occurrences of 28 collocations) for the list to be given in full: BRING

suit (x2), an action (x6), litigation (law)

CARRY CONSIDER

a motion (politics)

CREATE ESTABLISH HOLD INTRODUCE MAINTAIN MAKE OBTAIN PLACE PUBLISH RECEIVE REJECT SHOW

a bill, a decision (law) liability (9), tort (law) liability (2), tort (law) shares, a term (law), rights ( x 6 ) a bill (x2), an act (law) forces (military t e c h n o l o g y ) a lease (law) a conviction (x2) (law) a child(xl4)

(sociology)

(sociology)

bye-laws, a white-paper (x2), a bill (law) a child into care ( s o c i o l o g y ) , Royal Assent

(law)

a motion, an amendment (x2) (politics)

fault, negligence (law)

In none of the examples identified here can the verb be considered as technical in itself, in the way that amortize or cashier are (in other words having a single sense that is solely identified with a technical field). This is to be expected in view of the method used to search the corpora for collocations. It is likely that such technically specialized verbs would have failed to meet the frequency requirement of ten or more occurrences in both corpora.

93

In most cases the technical sense is a specialization of one of the figurative senses, selected by nouns that are identified with defined registers. At one extreme there are those such as bring an action that seem clearly technical, since the sub-sense of the verb is restricted to a specific register. In this case the relevant dictionary definition of bring is 'put forward in a lawcourt', and although it is not given the style label (law), the definition is sufficient to restrict its use to the appropriate register. There are, however, many more doubtful cases, such as consider a bill, obtain a conviction and reject a motion. Here the verbs involved have such broad meanings (encompassing technical uses) that it is not clear whether the senses in these collocations have the status of distinct technical meanings. For example, in a formal style requiring lexical precision a noun phrase such as Royal Assent will select the verb receive rather than get or have in order to conform to the norms of that register. The fact of the very strong selectivity of the noun gives the verb a specialized collocational role and therefore an additional semantic characteristic only activated by the specific lexical context. Receive in this case could be glossed as 'receive the assent of the monarch under the circumstances prescribed by the constitution'. The fine distinction between a technical and a non-technical sense can be seen in the case of show negligence. Here there is lexemic ambiguity between two restricted collocations. The first meaning 'be negligent' (in which the verb is figurative) would not be limited to a particular register, while the second meaning 'prove negligence' is tied to the language of law and classified here as technical. It is clear from the context, and perhaps from the passive form, that the second sense is activated in the following instance: [...] it was held that a public utility could not be liable for the effects of an explosion in gas pipes unless negligence could be shown. A further feature of technical meaning is the occasional problem presented to the analyst by unfamiliar collocational combinations. In the absence of a large subject-specific corpus (where repeated occurrences would provide confirmation), a specialist collocational dictionary or access to expert informants, it is difficult to determine whether an unfa miliar collocation is technical (highly register-specific) or non-standard. Ironically, it is their unfamiliarity that suggests that they are technically conventional, since the assumption is usually made by the lay reader that the writer has full phraseological competence. Occasionally, the oddity might lead the layman to suspect a misprint or slip of the pen. In this example proceedings has a resounding similarity to procedures, which collocates much more strongly with follow and might have been the target noun: Thus an argument was rejected that a public prosecutor proceeding with a criminal trial where the appropriate statutory preliminary proceedings had not been followed could be liable. In the next extract it may be that bring an application (occurring three times in the same text) is a standard legal collocation on analogy with bring an action, and the latter indeed appears in the second part of the sentence: Secondly, an application for judicial review must be brought promptly [...], while an ordinary action for damages may be brought any time within six years. (x3) When two noun objects are co-ordinated there may be collocational conflicts, whether the writer is conscious of them or not. Here, while do an act is quite conventional, do a decision is

94 discordant. Either this is acceptable within legal discourse, or there was no simple way of avoiding the discordance or the writer was unaware of the problem: Accordingly, decisions or acts are held not to be negligent if done while coping with an emergency, but would be considered negligent if done under other conditions. Significantly, another legal text by a different writer contains the same collocation, without the problem of co-ordination, strengthening the case for its technical status: [...] such a decision is actionable only if it is done in badfaith. The questions raised in the above discussion have been left largely unresolved and it must be recognized that this is a specialized and highly variable area of native speakers' phraseological competence for which one of the authorities mentioned above is needed. The role of dictionaries as authorities will be a major topic of Chapter Five. An important criterion in determining whether a sense is technical or not would seem to be not so much the semantics of the verb but the extent to which it is associated with a specific register. This, however, raises the question of what constitutes a register. While the language of law is easy enough to isolate, it is not clear whether, from a linguistic point of view, social science academic writing also qualifies as a register. If it does, there are numerous verbs such as discuss and follow that could be said to be used in restricted (and therefore technical) senses in those registers. These would, however, be distributed across the full range of texts in a corpus, thus losing any potential for defining a register. Conversely, as has been seen, the fact that a combination is found in just one category of texts does not in itself make the sense technical: the verb needs to be selected by the noun. This suggests that the identification of a technical sense of a verb depends on both the selectivity of the noun and the limited distribution across text types. It must be admitted however that, since the procedures for such identification were not one of the main foci of this research, the data on distribution have not been systematically gathered and analysed. 3.8.3 Delexicality The second category of semantic specialization demonstrates very different properties from technical senses, in that far from having a precise meaning associated with a specific field, delexical senses are in many cases impossible to define and are regarded as grammaticalized and semantically depleted or weakened. The special and (it will be shown) complex nature of delexicality is sufficient to make the collocations formed with verbs in delexical senses restricted without the further criterion of limited commutability being needed. Identification of delexicality depends not only on the semantic nature of the verb itself but also on the nature of the object noun and the equivalence of the collocation to certain morphologically related constructions. The tests for semantic depletion centre both on the semantic nature of the noun object and on the existence of a semantically equivalent simple intransitive verb or equivalent adjective: • • • •

semantic equivalence of verb + noun to lexical verb semantic equivalence of verb + noun to copula + adjective construction the noun being abstract and mass the noun being used in a figurative sense

95 Confusion can arise from the term 'delexical' being used to refer both to certain verbs (eg do, have, make, take etc) in all their manifestations and to certain uses of these verbs, and it should be clear that the criterion of semantic depletion applies here to senses of verbs rather than to the verbs themselves. It is clear, however, that such depletion is associated with a small and easily identified set of verbs. OALD in the Detailed Guide gives a list of 'commonly used' or 'heavy-duty' words (those that form part of large numbers of idioms, most especially phrasal verbs, and are therefore not used as key words for the purpose of listing idioms alphabetically in the dictionary). Of those, the following appear among the 63 verbs selected for this study: bring, do, get, give, have, make, put, see, set and take. In the data examined here it appears that the above criteria can be seen to apply most fully to six of the latter: do, get, give, have, make and take. Some are among the highest frequency verbs in the corpora, and the occurrences of these verbs account for a large proportion of all the data under discussion (1646 occurrences or 30% of the total). Using the six verbs listed above, each of the four criteria will be illustrated in turn. 1. Existence of equivalent lexical verb It is this feature that has been the focus of a number of studies (Stein 1991, Stein and Quirk 1991, Wierzbicka 1982; see also discussion in Sinclair and Renouf 1988), examining particularly the semantic relationship between delexical transitive patterns such as have a drink, take a sip, give a start and the intransitive verbs drink, sip and start. These verb + noun combinations fall chiefly into the category of restricted collocations (see Aisenstadt 1979, 1981 and Cowie 1991, 1992). In the central cases discussed in the studies mentioned above, the direction of derivation is from the verb to the noun (to drink -» a drink), though in most of the instances in this study the lexical verb is derived from the noun (an influence -> to influence). Using the term 'equivalent' allows for both directions of derivation and for the existence of a verb + noun structure with a morphologically related verb of equivalent meaning: mean —> (have) a meaning, imply —> (have) implications.4 (In the examples below the arrow (