Funky images

In my last post one of the comments (by nmwhiteport) was skeptical about the notion of core meaning of words as I used it to describe the verbs make and do in Collocations need not be arbitrary. One issue here is how to define core (of which the definitions I used may be debatable) and the other is even if people agree on definitions of core meaning is it more effective than learning words by memorisation?

Taking the first issue, Verspoor & Lowie (2003) give one definition of core (taken from a dictionary) as :

“The core meaning is the one that represents the most literal sense that the word has in modern usage. This is not necessarily the same as the oldest meaning, because word meanings change over time. Nor is it necessarily the most frequent meaning, because figurative senses are sometimes the most frequent. It is the meaning accepted by native speakers as the one that is most established as literal and central.”

Verspoor & Lowie, 2003: 555

Note that Tyler & Evans (2003) give a more rigorous approach in identifying what they refer to as primary sense.

Using the Verspoor & Lowie (2003) definition one can say the literal meaning of make is to create something new from nothing and that of do is to execute an activity. A diagram could be presented to illustrate this over time:

(Tsai, 2014: 94)

(Tsai, 2014: 94)

Perhaps nmwhiteport’s puzzle loving student would be less likely to produce ‘make a crossword’ having seen the above diagrams and noted how make involves “a nothing to a something” compared to do which has a “something to a samething”?

One clue to the second issue of the efficacy of core meaning is seen in Verspoor and Lowie (2003) who found that students who were given a core meaning were better able to interpret extended meanings better than students who were given translated meanings of a more peripheral sense. This difference held when students were tested 2 weeks later.

Similarly when lexical items overlap as described in the last post with the example of high and tall, Beréndi, Csábi & Kövesces (2008), provided central senses of hold and keep to one group of students (key idea of hand in hold and control in keep) and asked another group of students to translate various hold and keep sentences from English into Hungarian. The first group of students who got the core meanings did better than the second group in both immediate and delayed post-tests.

A core meaning approach has been used with prepositions (Tyler & Evans, 2004), phrasal verbs (Condon & Kelly, 2002, as cited in Tyler, 2012) and article use (Thu, H. N., & Huong, N. T., 2005).

One interesting thing to note is that the addition of images in cognitive linguistics studies seem to be very helpful in learning performance. Hence I have started a database of images that could be useful in language teaching, mainly for English but other languages can be added. So please do let me know or do share link with people who may be interested.

References

Beréndi, M., Csábi, S., & Kövecses, Z. (2008). Using conceptual metaphors and metonymies in vocabulary teaching. In F. Boers & S. Lindstromberg (Eds.), Cognitive linguistic approaches to teaching vocabulary and phraseology (pp. 65–100). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Thu, H. N., & Huong, N. T. (2005). Vietnamese learners mastering English articles (Published doctoral dissertation).

Tsai, M. H. (2014). Usage-based cognitive semantics in L2 collocation: A microgenetic analysis of EFL students’ collocational knowledge (Unpublished doctoral dissertation).

Tyler, A. (2012). Cognitive linguistics and second language learning: Theoretical basics and experimental evidence. Routledge.

Tyler, A., & Evans, V. (2003). The semantics of English prepositions: Spatial scenes, embodied meaning and cognition. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Verspoor, M. H., & Lowie, W. (2003). Making sense of polysemous words. Language Learning, 53, 547–586.

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Collocations need not be arbitrary

“On the whole, delexicalized verbs are a good way of introducing the concept of collocation to learners of any L1 background. I usually start with make/do and show how one goes with homework while the other goes with mistake (I did my homework; I made a lot of mistakes). Why is it this way and not the other way around? Because words have collocations – they prefer the company of certain other words.” (Selivan, 2018:28, emphasis added)

The quote above, from a book published in 2018, reflects a pervasive view in the literature that collocations are arbitrary, that is, there is no particular reason why words “prefer the company of certain other words”, they just do.

Liu (2010) identifies this view of collocation-as-arbitrary as wide-spread amongst scholars, he also demonstrates that it is a common assumption in published teaching materials. Of the books, studies and websites on teaching collocations he observes collocation exercises as mainly noticing and memorising fixed units or in other words form focused exercises.

Example of such exercises are:

“identifying or marking collocations in a passage or in collocation dictionaries; reading passages with collocations highlighted or marked; filling in the blanks with the right word in a collocation; choosing or matching correct collocates; translating collocations from L2 back into L1 or vice versa; and memorization-type activities like repetition and rehearsal” (Liu, 2010:21)

There were fewer exercises on linking collocation forms to their meanings.

In addition to overlooking the motivated aspects of collocations, learners also miss the chance to generalise what they learn (Wray, 2000). That is, collocations also need to be analysed if students are to make the most of them in new situations of use.

To take the examples of “make” and “do”, the core meaning of “make” is create, which is a process that is purposeful and/or more effortful than the core meaning of “do” of completion/the finishing of something, which focuses on the end result of an activity rather than on any effort in the process of that activity. Understanding these core meanings can throw light on the following use of “did a mistake”:

“But I did a mistake in talking about it, you know, the last time and recently”

The larger context of this is from a spoken news report:

weren’t there. Let me handle it. I said, " Yes, ma’am. " ROSEN: The rebuke of Mr. Clinton by his wife came after the former president revived the dormant issue of Mrs. Clinton’s own misstatements about her 1996 trip to Bosnia. You’ll recall Mrs. Clinton, in recent months, spoke of sniper fire jeopardizing her landing. But contemporaneous video and eyewitness account revealed there was no such threat, and the senator effectively if belatedly defused the story with an omission of error in late March. SEN-HILLARY-CLINTO: But I did a mistake in talking about it, you know, the last time and recently. ROSEN: But in Jasper, Indiana, Thursday, Mr. Clinton blamed the controversy on the biased news media. B-CLINTON: She took a terrible beating in the press for a few days because she was exhausted at 11:00 at night when she started talking about Bosnia. ROSEN: In fact, Mrs. Clinton related the false Bosnia story numerous times including in a prepared speech delivered freshly at mid morning. B-CLINTON: And then the president (COCA SPOK: FOX SPECIAL REPORT WITH BRIT HUME 6:00 PM EST, 2008, emphasis added)

We could speculate that in using “did a mistake” Hilary Clinton was implying that in her “exhausted” state the “misstatement” was the opposite of a purposeful lie. It was just one of many activities she did that day which happened to be an error.

This can also be seen in another example from COCA – “If I do a mistake, I’m cooked”.

The context is from a written publication this time, although the language in question is in reported form:

three minutes, sometimes the whole roll — eleven minutes. It has an advantage: It takes you to the real tempo of life. Most movies are shot rather quickly and in a way where you can manipulate your reality because of the amount of coverage ” — shooting a scene from many different angles so that the director can choose among them in the editing room. ” Here my manipulation is quite different. I have to build it in with the lighting, with the framing. It requires much more attention at this stage. If I do a mistake, I’m cooked, ” he says with a laugh. # Wings’ visual style may be old-fashioned at heart, but its sound is high-tech all the way. Besides the six channels of top-notch stereo sound broadcast through the theater speakers, Wings audiences will hear two channels of three-dimensional sound through a special headset called the Personal Sound Environment (PSE) distributed to each moviegoer. Developed by Imax affiliate Sonics Associates of Birmingham, Alabama, the PSE incorporates both IMAX 3-D glasses and tiny speakers mounted between (COCA MAG: Omni, 1994, emphasis added)

The person is talking about a number of steps in their work routine in shooting a movie. The use of “do” here is to signal that any disastrous mistake is not to be blamed on the person considering all the other things he has to juggle.

Note that I could only find 3 uses of “do a mistake”, of which 2 are shown here (the third one I can’t offer any speculation on as I suspect more context needs to be chased up than that provided by COCA).

This blog was inspired by a question from a student about why a text had “in many respects” rather than “in many aspects”. I went onto COCA to have a look but could not discern any useful explanation. I just told the student that “aspects” does not seem to prefer “in many” compared to “respects”! Only later when I thought about the root word in common “spect” (meaning see) did a arguably useful explanation present itself – “in many respects” implies that the [re-seeings] have already been understood in some way. While “in many aspects” the reader may not yet know what these [partial-seeings] may be. These meanings could match up with the observation that “in many respects” often comes at the end of a clause or sentence while “in many aspects” may tend to come at the beginning of a clause or sentence.

Thanks for reading.

References:

Davies, M. (2008). Corpus of contemporary American English online. Retrieved from https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/.

Liu, D. (2010). Going beyond patterns: Involving cognitive analysis in the learning of collocations. TESOL Quarterly, 44(1), 4-30.

Selivan, L. (2018). Lexical Grammar: Activities for Teaching Chunks and Exploring Patterns. Cambridge University Press.

Wray, A. (2000). Formulaic sequences in second language teaching: Principle and practice. Applied linguistics, 21(4), 463-489.

Traditional linguistics say ‘subject-verb agreement’ Columbia School linguistics say ‘verb number noun number pairs’.

Consider the following from some student writing on cyber warfare:
By the way, conventional warfare appear more dangerous because the cyber warfare is young, not yet fully exploited and easily hidden from the public.

By conventional thinking we may point out the “subject-verb agreement” error in “conventional warfare appear more dangerous”.

However Columbia School linguistics not only considers the number on the noun but also the number on the verb. Say what? The following borrows heavily from a part of a 2011 paper titled The communicative function of English verb number by Wallis Reid.

Noun number is widely known e.g. take the noun ‘CatØ’ here there is ONE entity in focus (indicated by the zero signal Ø) add a suffix -S and there is MORE THAN ONE entity in focus – ‘CatS’. Now take the verb ‘iS’ – the suffix -S indicates ONE entity in focus and no signal on the verb such as ‘areØ’ indicates MORE THAN ONE entity in focus.

The reason why the noun number usually matches the verb number is that it creates a local redundancy that helps parse the items which crossed pairing (mismatches of noun number and verb number) do not create.

That is the matched pairings apply to the same aspect of the message – the hearer is getting multiple semantic clues to approximately the same thing. Consider ‘the girls play‘ – this can be parsed and understood in isolation because the MORE THAN ONE of ‘girls‘ and the MORE THAN ONE of ‘playØ’ both indicate the number of ‘players’ and hence mutually support the parsing of girls as “subject noun” and play as “verb” (I am putting subject noun and verb in quotations to use familiar terms so as to avoid going into the terminology that Columbia Linguistics uses, see paper for more on this).

Now consider that in crossed pairings each meaning applies to a different aspect of the message and so cannot help in identifying the other. So ‘the girls plays‘ is un-interpretable in isolation because there is no contextual support to help a hearer construct a message that would justify the ONE (entity in focus) of ‘plays‘ in light of the MORE THAN ONE (entity) of ‘girls‘. Thus, all things equal, more contextual support from elsewhere is needed to identify crossed number pairings than matched pairings.

So taking into account the independent effects of noun number and verb number we can reconsider our student sentence:
By the way, conventional warfare appear more dangerous because the cyber warfare is young, not yet fully exploited and easily hidden from the public.

In “conventional warfare appear more dangerous” we can say the entity in focus with respect to appearing dangerous is a plurality which contrasts with the singular entity in focus with respect to being young (and not fully exploited and easily hidden from the public) in “the cyber warfare is young”. Now considered in this light perhaps the student’s use of such a contrast is worth praising rather than admonishing?

Some food for thought next time an ‘agreement’ issue pops up in your student writing ; )

References:

Reid, W. (2011). The communicative function of English verb number. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 29(4), 1087-1146.

Signs o’ the times – some/any invariant meanings and COCA

I am glad to be writing this particular (rushed, see end) post as it involves corpus linguistics and I have not done such a post for a while. It is also about my current interest – Columbia School linguistics.

I have been over the years less enamored of the power of corpus linguistics for language teaching. It is certainly very useful to access descriptions of language but that is not enough. Explanations are also needed. Columbia School (CS) linguistics is about analyzing invariant meanings that motivate choices in both grammar and lexis. It is about one form to one meaning mappings – an ideal aim when looking to help students.

Nadav Sabar in 2016 analyses the use of some and any. The following borrows heavily from this paper.

Most pedagogical grammars state (formal) rules such as “any is used in negative sentences and not in affirmative statements”. Yet such rules cannot account for why some is used in contexts that are said to be used for any. Sabar gives the following attested example:

1) When Yvonne lived in Italy, where it seems like the whole country is married, people always wanted to know about her personal life. I remember her telling me that every time she’d come back from a great vacation, the first question from married friends was, “Did you meet anybody?” It was as if the whole point of going on vacation was to meet someone. That she had a great time and saw something new and interesting didn’t matter. The entire vacation was cancelled or a flop because she didn’t meet someone. (http://www.yvonneandyvettetiquette.com/2008_09_01_archive.html)

Formal accounts could only say that any is also acceptable as in she didn’t meet anyone and is unconcerned with why the writer chose some in this case.

Formal accounts use the sentence as unit of analysis and see meaning as compositional – i.e. the meanings of individual words in a sentence add to the whole. CS uses signs (pairing of symbol to meaning) as the unit of analysis and sees meaning as instrumental rather than compositional. That is the individual meanings of signals need not add up to sentence meaning. There is a distinction between linguistic code that has an invariant meaning (that always corresponds to a linguistic signal) and interpretation of the code which is the subjective outcome of messages. Meanings are very sparse in that they do not encode messages but only offer prompts that may only suggest message elements.

The meaning hypotheses of some and any are shown below:

I.e. some as RESTRICTED suggests limits, internal divisions, boundaries while any as UNRESTRICTED suggests no boundaries, limits or divisions. Note that this does not mean that the domain in question in reality has no divisions or boundaries. Just that the reality is irrelevant to the message. Also note that in a pedagogical grammar such as Martin Parrott’s this meaning division between restricted and unrestricted is only described for stressed SOME and ANY.

Sabar uses the following as examples:

2) If you see something, say something. (New York City public safety slogan)
3) No parking any time (street sign)

In 2) some is used because the message suggested is a restriction on the set of things people see and say. The context drives the inference as to the nature of the restriction – suspicious looking things. Any could also have been used but that would not have been as effective a message – any would have suggested no restriction i.e. people should call no matter what they see.

Similarly in 3) any is used because there is no restriction on the domain of times of the day.

So now for 1) we can see some is used because the message suggests a restriction of the set of people Yvonne did not meet, and the context shows that this restriction as people who may qualify as marriage potential.

Now the interesting corpus linguistics part.

The methodology of CS first involves a qualitative step where some aspect of the sign in question is looked at. So for some which suggests restriction another element which suggests the same is looked for:

4) Some Feds [Federal workers] are held up as national heroes while others are considered a national joke. (ABC Nightline: Income Tax)

Here others is used to refer to a different subset of people within the domain of Federal workers. This message element is also suggested by some – RESTRICTED. This does not mean there is only one reason for the choice of these forms rather that this message feature of internal division is one reason out of many possible reasons that has motivated the choice of these two forms.

To test this claim generally we can look at a corpus to see if there is a higher than probable chance that others occurs with some more than others occurs with any.

We can do this in COCA by using these search terms:

COCA searches for others:

Favoured	Disfavoured
some [up to 9 slots] others	any [up to 9 slots] others

The following screenshot shows how to find some [up to 9 slots] others (do similar for any):

To find some with not others see the next screenshot (i.e. use the minus sign -):

And tabulating the data in a contingency table:

	others present		others absent
	N	%	N	%
some	19078	90	8946046	65
any	2022	10	4841946	35
Total	21100	100	13787992	100

p < .0001

The table percentages and significance test supports the claim that there is one message feature that motivates use of both some and others. Note that the meaning hypothesis itself is not directly tested; it is only indirectly tested via the counts in COCA. Sabar goes onto to test both qualitatively and quantitatively other signals that contribute to the meaning hypothesis of some – RESTRICTED and any – UNRESTRICTED.

I wondered how the singular other would distribute with any and some:

	other present		other absent
	N	%	N	%
any	39244	52	4811937	35
some	35175	48	8930621	65
Total	74419	100	13742558	100

p < .0001

Here can we say that singular other contributes to a message meaning of unrestricted? I have no idea as I have not had time to explore this further!

I hope dear reader you forgive the rushed nature of this post but I wanted to get something up before the risk of forgetting this due to holiday haze!

Thanks for indulging.

Update 1:

Thanks to heads up from some tweeters Michael Lewis in his book The English Verb in 1986 was also pointing to the primacy of meaning:

Update 2:

Nadav Sabar has pointed out that he looked for others in one direction i.e. following some/any whereas I looked at occurrence of others both following and before some/any.
Plus in a new version of his paper a window size of 2 is used instead of 9.

References:

Parrott, M. (2000). Grammar for English language teachers: with exercises and a key. Cambridge University Press.

Sabar, N. (2016). Using big data to test meaning hypotheses for any and some. In Otheguy, R., Stern, N., Reid, W. and Ruggles, J. (Eds.) Columbia School linguistics in the 21st century: advances in sign-based linguistics. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Retrieved from [https://www.academia.edu/33968803/Using_big_data_to_test_meaning_hypotheses_of_some_and_any]

Article use: from cognitive salience to discourse differentiation

The following borrows heavily from the original paper.

Elena Gorokhova in 1995 reports on a developmental stage description of article use by Spanish L1 learners of English. She follows a description of final state article use that was formulated by William Diver – the founder of Columbia School linguistics which is a sign-based functional linguistics account. A sign is a pairing of a signal with its meaning.

In Diver’s account the/a signals a need to differentiate referents in a piece of discourse while the Ø zero article signals no such need. The signal is used when there is enough information available to differentiate referents and a/an signal is used when there is insufficient information available to differentiate referents. For the Ø zero article four communicative reasons are given:

a) referent is unimportant to message as message is about an associated activity.
He went to Ø bed early (went to sleep on whatever bed)

b) referent important but no chance of confusion
He went Ø home (his home)
He went to Ø school (his school)

c) only one possible referent
Ø Einstein died in Ø Princeton

d) no differentiation among instances needed
Ø Water boils at 100C (any and all water)

The above is represented in the figure below:

Gorokhova then postulates  4 stages based on her longitudinal data which culminate in the Standard English state shown above.

In the first stage learners only have the which is used with cognitively more salient referents. Hence important and visible referents are signaled by the:

In stage II the signal a is acquired. The now in addition to signaling importance is used to mark large size of a visible referent. A signals visible referents smaller in size and which are less important. Note that in stages I and II the and a are used very differently to the end state standard English. In stages I and II they are used to show degrees of attention whilst in the end state standard English they are used to show degrees of differentiation of referents in discourse:

Stage III learners begin to pay attention to the larger discourse although their linguistic value is still based on cognitive salience. Stage III is a transitional stage:

In stage IV discourse plays a significant role in the use of articles. Learners choose the and a on differentiation of referents. Context is used from restrictive clause or noun phrases or successive mention of the same referent. The is also used with familiar referents such as bank, school etc:

In stage V students acquire use of the Ø zero article. Here also “frame anaphora” is evoked by the use of the e.g. Someone is driving and there are people in the back seat. The speaker relies on shared non-linguistic knowledge (driving is usually done in a car which usually has seats) with the hearer. This stage is hard to acquire – of the seventy learners in Gorokhova’s study only two showed Stage V article usage.

Although this study suggests a particular order of acquisition – The > A > Ø Zero article, there is no consensus in the literature. Some studies support this order, others show A > The > Ø Zero article, others show Ø Zero article > The > A.

What is heavily implied though is that due to the discourse effects on article use, articles should not be taught in isolated sentences but with a piece of discourse in addition to background information about the speaker and hearer.

I recently drew Figure 1 and Master’s figure of Classification vs Identification with a student. She preferred Master’s figure as she had trouble understanding the word differentiation. It should be noted in this case of focus on form and meaning there was only a cursory look in response to her question about using articles.

Thanks for reading and do check the Columbia School of linguistics as I believe this approach has a lot of potential for use in class. And do also check some other thoughts on article use here:

1. Articles and collocational effects
2. Classified and Identified – A pedagogical grammar for article use
3. A, an, the, definiteness and specificity

References:

Gorokhova, E. (1995). Acquisition of English articles by native speakers of Spanish. In Contini-Morava, E. & Goldberg, B. S. (Eds.) Meaning as explanation: Advances in linguistic sign theory,  441-452. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Articles and collocational effects

While I was doing some marking I came across what Master (2007) in discussing article choice has called “overgeneralisations from similar patterns” or effects of collocational phrases.

The following patterns were found in the same essay (on cyber warfare):
1. Those types of attacks are occurring everyday, and are often due to the lack of awareness of the victims.
2. The USA has declared unofficially that they have been under several cyber attacks from China, but with the lack of evidence, they can’t press charges against them.

In 1 article use seems to be okay but in 2 at first glance there seems to be an error i.e. the student should have chosen “a lack of evidence”.

However Master (2007) argues that:

article selection may have been the product of overgeneralization from an already learned collocational phrase rather than from the misapplication of a rule.

In our example we can see that in 1 the student has correctly used “due to the lack of awareness of the victims” whilst in 2 we could argue that the student is implying the thought “with the lack of evidence (that they have)”.

In marking feedback you might consider that since in sentence 1 the student has postmodified “the lack of awareness” with “of the victims” then we could give the student the benefit of the doubt in sentence 2 by saying they are implying a postmodification of “that they have” in the use of definite article in “the lack of evidence”.

Master (2007) found based on 20 low-advanced proficient students doing timed essays that:

more than a quarter of the article “errors” were actually viable choices that should have been honored.

He classed his data into noun phrase structure, modification structure and discourse structure. The noun phrase structures included count/noncount, generic/specific and idioms. The modification structures included pre-modifying ranking adjectives, postmodified/nonmodified, unlimited/limited quantity, partitive/descriptive Of-phrases, intentional vagueness. The discourse structure was first and subsequent mention.

As an example of a count/non-count distinction:

An example of a pedagogical intervention is:

Master (2007) uses two reasons to justify this approach of looking at how students  choose articles. One is that based on Yoon & Bailey (1988), as cited by Masters (2007), “teachers as editors often correct article usage in ways unintended by the original author”. And two based on Sheen (2007), as cited by Masters (2007), metacognitive feedback in addition to corrective feedback can impact student article use more than just corrective feedback.

Furthermore teaching article use in context such as lexical bundles, which are another form of collocation, has shown to be effective (Shin & Kim 2017). It must be noted that the chances of finding what could be called a paired example (as in my student’s two sentences above) may be rare and so giving students more leeway could be harder to justify.

Thanks for reading and if you want to explore more on article use have a read of some previous scribbles on this: Classified and Identified – A pedagogical grammar for article use and A, an, the, definiteness and specificity.

References:

Master, P. (2007). Article errors and article choices. The CATESOL Journal, 19(1), 107-131. Retrieved from (pdf) [http://www.catesoljournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/CJ19_master.pdf]

 

Shin, Y. K., & Kim, Y. (2017). Using lexical bundles to teach articles to L2 English learners of different proficiencies. System, 69, 79-91.

Classified and Identified – A pedagogical grammar for article use

1990 was a good year for music – Happy Mondays, Stone Roses, Primal Scream, James, House of Love. 1990 was also good for what is, in my humble opinion, one of the best pedagogical grammars for article instruction – Peter Master’s paper Teaching the English Articles as a Binary System published in TESOL Quarterly.

It is a pedagogical grammar because it simplifies the four main characteristics of articles definiteness[+/-definite], specificity[+/-specific], countability[+/-count] and number[+/-singular] into two bigger concepts namely classification and identification. So 0 or no article and a/an is used to classify and the used to identify.

As discussed in a previous post the two main features of articles are definiteness and specificity. So the four possible combinations are:
1a. [-definite][+specific] A tick entered my ear.
b. [-definite][-specific] A tick carries disease.
c. [+definite][+specific] The computer is down today.
d. [+definite][-specific] The computer is changing our lives

Master’s binary scheme emphasizes 1b and 1c at the expense of 1a and 1d. That is +identification feature describes [+definite][+specific] and -identification or classification describes [-definite] [-specific].

The effect of ignoring specificity in indefinite uses is saying all uses of no article or a/an is essentially generic. Whether we mean a specific, actual tick as in 1a or a generic one as in 1b we still classify that tick when using the article a. Paraphrased as something that can be classified as a tick entered my ear/carries disease.

The effect of ignoring specificity in definite uses is saying that all uses of the are essentially specific. Although the difference between 1c and 1d is significant we can rely on the fact that generic the is relatively infrequent. Further some argue that generic the is not very different from specific the. The identified quality of a generic noun like the computer is held onto. We do not classify one-of-a-group for computer until we interpret the rest of the sentence. And when we understand the noun as requiring a generic interpretation we seem to see such interpretation through the individual. So generic the is considered as “the identification of a class”

Master goes on to give some advice for teaching classification. For instance, have students sort a pile of objects into categories – These are books/These are pencils/This is paper/This is a pen.

For identification have students identify members in the categories – This is the blue book/These are the red pencils/This is the A4 paper/This is the new pen.

In addition teach them that proper nouns, possessive determiners (my, her), possessive ’s (the girl’s), demonstratives (this, that) and some other determiners (e.g. either/neither,each, every) —> identify; while no article , a/an, and determiners such as some/any one —> classify.
Countability only needs to be considered for classified nouns as identified nouns require the whether they be countable or not.

Master then provides the following chart:

After the concepts of classification and identification are presented and practiced details of use can be shown as in the table below:

From Master, 2002

I won’t repeat what Master says as I have already done too much of that. Once you read Master’s paper the two figures can be used as a memory aid.

Master says that discourse effects of article use (e.g. given/theme and new/rheme) can be matched onto his binary schema i.e. given info is identification and new info is classification. And that for many noun phrase uses of article such as ranking adjectives, world shared knowledge, descriptive vs partitive of phrases, intentional vagueness, proper nouns and idiomatic phrases there is no need to go beyond the sentence unless first/subsequent mention is involved.

Thanks for reading.

References:

Master, P. (1990). Teaching the English articles as a binary system. Tesol Quarterly, 24(3), 461-478.

Master, P. (2002). Information structure and English article pedagogy. System, 30(3), 331-348.

Clinton conditional conundrum

This is a short post that sparked my curiosity about conditionals. Take it as you want.

Recently a story has emerged about Hilary Clinton. The popular quote is this:

And if we were going to push for an election, then we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win.

[http://observer.com/2016/10/2006-audio-emerges-of-hillary-clinton-proposing-rigging-palestine-election/]

A more extended quote is this:

First, I don’t think we should have pushed for an election in the Palestinian territories. I think that was a big mistake. If we were going to push for an election, we should have made sure we did something to determine who was going to win instead of signing off on an electoral system that advantaged Hamas.

[http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1725828/posts]

According to the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, CGEL (Huddleston & Pullum, 2002) there are two kinds of conditionals – open and remote. Open refers to something that may or may not be the case, remote refers to something being unlikely or remote.

Remote conditionals must have a modal auxiliary in the main clause (e.g. should) and a modal past form were in the if part.

For the first Clinton quote we have these two features hence this is a remote conditional.

If we look at the fuller quote we can argue that Clinton wanted to emphasize to this particular audience that the Bush administration at that time made a mistake. She uses the conditional to highlight this by imagining an alternative world where she was involved in making the decision. In this world she would have done something more than “signing off on an electoral system that advantaged Hamas” and “did something to determine who was going to win”.

Now as to whether this means she would have rigged the election is up for anyone to speculate and whether that applies to election rigging in the US is similarly up for grabs.

I’d be very interested to get your opinion, thanks for reading.

References:

Huddleston, R., & Pullum, G. K. (2002). The Cambridge grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

A, an, the, definiteness and specificity

This is my attempt at recombobulating my thoughts on article use. Information is mainly drawn from Ionin, Ko & Wexler (2004) and Thornbury (2009). All errors mine.

The following are the (informal) definitions used by Ionin, Ko & Wexler (2004) for definiteness and specificity:

[+definite] the speaker and hearer presuppose the existence of a unique individual

[+specific] the speaker intends to refer to a unique individual and considers this individual to possess some noteworthy property

Ionin, Ko & Wexler, 2004, p.5

The paper argues that English as a two article system (a/an, the) favours the definite-indefinite categorization hence the is definite and a indefinite and it does not mark any articles for specificity. Other languages like Samoan favour the specific-nonspecific categorization where they use le with specific and se with non-specific and does not mark any articles for definiteness.

Side note: apparently in spoken English this can be used to specify nouns (i.e. referential use of this vs demonstrative use) hence we can consider also that English is a three-article system!

The theory is that learners fluctuate between categorizing nouns on definiteness and categorizing nouns on specificity until they eventually settle on definiteness as their proficiency grows.

Both systems of definiteness and specificity predict that learners will use one article the for definite specific and one article a for indefinite non-specific.
However these systems differ on what article will be used with specific indefinites and non-specific definites.

That is the definiteness system will group specific definites with non-specific definites i.e. predict use of the article the; and will group specific indefinites with non-specific indefinites i.e. predict the use of the article a. See Table 1:

Table 1, Ionin, Ko & Wexler, 2004, p.13

By contrast the specificity system will do the opposite – it will group definite specifics with indefinite specifics i.e. predict the use of the article the; and it will group definite non-specifics with indefinite non-specifics i.e. predict the use of the article a. See Table 2:

Table 2, Ionin, Ko & Wexler, 2004, p.13

This means that the theory will predict overuse of the article the in specific indefinites and overuse of the article a in non-specific definites. See Table 3:

Table 3, adapted from Ionin, Ko & Wexler, 2004, p.19

So what does this mean for teaching articles? Not sure but knowing that learners will tend to overuse the with indefinites and overuse a/an with definites due to the conflict with the specificity system is enlightening. Further I found the definitions in the paper very useful as I was confused about how specificity was different from definiteness.

I’ll put here a revised table (Table 4) from Scott Thornbury’s blog on articles that does not have the confusing (for me) label general and colour coded for overuse as in Table 3 above.

Table 4, adapted from Thornbury, 2009

Finally for your students do check Glenys Hanson’s exercises and flowchart.

Thanks for reading.

References:

Ionin, T., Ko, H., & Wexler, K. (2004). Article semantics in L2 acquisition: The role of specificity. Language Acquisition, 12(1), 3-69.

Thornbury, S. (2009). A is for Articles (1) – An AZ of ELT – WordPress.com. Retrieved April 2, 2016, from https://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2009/12/12/a-is-for-articles-1/.