What’s that supposed to mean: chunking – part two
by Michael Rundell
It’s generally accepted that “chunking” – the tendency of words to form combinations which are both recurrent and non-random – is an important feature of language. But in some of the recent discussion of this topic, doubts have been raised as to how far these combinations are worth teaching. Some argue that learning large numbers of “chunks” imposes too great a burden on students, when they could get by well enough with less idiomatic expressions. One well-known sceptic, Michael Swan, cautions against “formulaic expressions” being given “more attention than they deserve”, arguing that this may distract from the central tasks of mastering grammar and vocabulary.
But surely this is a false distinction – as if chunks on the one hand, and grammar and vocabulary on the other, can be viewed as separate parts of the language system. Corpus linguistics shows that this is not a convincing model of how language works. As linguists like Palmer, Firth and Sinclair have demonstrated, phraseology is an integral part of language, and you can’t really “know” a word unlesss you know how it typically combines with other words.
Brett Reynolds makes a distinction between “fun facts” about language and “useful facts [and] skills”, and implies that most chunks are fun rather than useful. One of the important types of chunk is collocation, and Reynolds claims that “few collocations are useful enough to bother teaching”, because “collocations tend to be rare”. This will come as a surprise to lexicographers and corpus linguists. Language data tells us that collocation is an essential part of the way we communicate.
Take the example of the word crime. It occurs around 150,000 times in our corpus of almost 2 billion words, and in 33,000 of these examples, it is the object of a verb. The evidence shows that relatively few verbs regularly combine with crime, and these include:
commit: almost 7000 instances
reduce: 3500
tackle: 1800
report: 1500
prevent: 1000
fight: 950
combat: 725
solve: 650
The numbers are approximate, but they show that these eight verbs account for over half of all verb+crime combinations. Similar patterns appear in other grammatical relations, such as crime+noun (where words like prevention, rate and scene are very common), and adjective+crime (where common collocates include serious, petty, violent and organized). Some of these combinations are predictable (a learner might get them right by guesswork) but most are not.
Brett Reynolds suggests that learners can get by with saying “heavy wind” rather than the more natural-sounding “strong wind”. If we apply this argument to crime, a speaker might say that someone “did a bad crime” (rather than the more idiomatic “committed a serious crime”), and s/he would still be understood. Well, yes – but is this what learners really want? The fact is that it is almost impossible to talk about crime without knowing its most frequent collocates, so the idea that collocations are too rare to be worth teaching is hard to accept.
Some will argue that for simple communicative purposes (especially in an ELF context), collocation is a luxury we can do without. What I will suggest in the third and last post on this topic is that it is often difficult to understand what someone means without a good grasp of collocation.
Well, it depends on how you count words, but this probably means something like 10,000 word families or so should be taught. And if we estimate that each has three collocations in this frequency range, that requires the teaching of 40,000 items. Surely, the impracticalities of this endeavour begin to become clear.
Ug. That should be “most folks” not “more folks” and “contend” not “content”.