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Grammar Questions
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MO39



Joined: 28 Jan 2004
Posts: 1970
Location: El ombligo de la Rep�blica Mexicana

PostPosted: Fri Dec 05, 2008 5:06 pm    Post subject: Re: Grammar Questions Reply with quote

Littlebird wrote:
Wow thanks a lot !!!

I'm afraid your explanations go over my head Fluffy Hamster.


I've been successfully teaching English, including grammar, for over 30 years, and most of fluffyhamster's explanations go over my head too, Littlebird! What on earth does "lexicalize" mean in non-teaching-jargon English? And what are "computerized corpora", and what do they have to do with constructing examples of verb tenses or aspects or whatever you choose to call them for classroom use?

After reading this thread, I either need a stiff drink or need to go back to school and get a degree in the latest theories of English grammar. I wonder which would make me a better teacher? Confused
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Stephen Jones



Joined: 21 Feb 2003
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 05, 2008 6:01 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Quote:
After reading this thread, I either need a stiff drink or need to go back to school and get a degree in the latest theories of English grammar. I wonder which would make me a better teacher?
You're talking about incredibly basic points. Your best solution is probably hemlock but you could start by googling.
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fluffyhamster



Joined: 13 Mar 2005
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Location: UK > China > Japan > UK again

PostPosted: Fri Dec 05, 2008 6:31 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

MO39, if you want to know what computerized corpora are (and can do for ELT), look no further than the COBUILD project (@1987 onwards), and pretty much most British learner dictionaries and quite a few other types of publication (e.g. some textbooks) released since about 1995 (roughly the time the BNC at least was coming to fruition). I am frankly amazed that anyone working in this field could be unaware of such developments, because they are of immense PRACTICAL benefit and therefore relevance. As for "random lexicalization", that basically means inserting lexis sometimes or indeed often at random into the "slots" apparently available in "grammar" structures, which is what British ELT writers had to do until HarperCollins or whatever they were then called invested in the COBUILD venture (which forced other British publishers to up their game), and which it seems is what many American writers still seem content to do (and I really don't think it is my imagination that there is a discernible difference in the quality of examples on offer from publishers on each side of the Atlantic - see for examples Sidney Landau's comments -he's American - in his Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography, Second Edition).

I mean, functional intuition at least should tell you that we don't usually go around saying things like 'The student is holding his grammar book', 'Is the student holding his grammar book?' etc (the import of somebody holding an object doesn't seem very relevant unless e.g. in the context of it being a weapon: He was holding a knife, an example from the LDOCE4, said perhaps by an armed policeman defending a decision to open fire on a suspect (and he could have instead simply said, He had a knife). Or in the context of a friend turning up on your doorstep holding/with a suitcase etc. Certainly, there is nothing "remark-able" in a student holding a grammar book (well, not unless it's a copy of Azar, and in MY classroom!!! LOL. A student at the back of the class was sitting holding a book in his trembling hands, his eyes wide with incomprehension if not blind terror. What could it be - a copy of the foul Necronomicon, perhaps? No, it was worse - an Azar! It all made sense now!)).

The LDOCE4's first/central/prototypical meaning-entry's examples include the far more useful and interesting (conversationally-speaking) ideas of Could you hold my bag for me? ( > take; watch etc; all simple aspect) or They sat holding hands under a tree ( > Hey, I just saw A and B holding hands/kissing/canoodling! etc); and there are dozens more entries and phrases, only a small minority of which seem to exhibit progressive aspect (and these are needless to say more interesting than the 'holding a grammar book' variety). This level of attention to detail is what I would call non-random, USEFUL lexicalization of "grammar" structure (or, if you prefer, non-random, useful "grammaring" of the lexis).

Or you could just read something by John Sinclair, or Michael Lewis, or Susan Hunston, or Ronald Carter & Michael McCarthy, or Michael Stubbs, or...the list goes on. A keyword is 'lexicogrammar'.


Last edited by fluffyhamster on Mon Dec 08, 2008 3:29 pm; edited 2 times in total
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MO39



Joined: 28 Jan 2004
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Location: El ombligo de la Rep�blica Mexicana

PostPosted: Fri Dec 05, 2008 6:41 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Stephen Jones wrote:
Quote:
After reading this thread, I either need a stiff drink or need to go back to school and get a degree in the latest theories of English grammar. I wonder which would make me a better teacher?
You're talking about incredibly basic points. Your best solution is probably hemlock but you could start by googling.


Holier-than-thou comments like this, SJ, do nothing to help answer my questions, which have to do more with the words (or should I say "lexical items") employed by fluffyhamster than the concepts they purport to describe. Is this how you deal with questions from your students that you consider to be such "basic points" that they are unworthy of your attention?
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fluffyhamster



Joined: 13 Mar 2005
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Location: UK > China > Japan > UK again

PostPosted: Fri Dec 05, 2008 7:29 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

MO39 wrote:
What on earth does "lexicalize" mean in non-teaching-jargon English? And what are "computerized corpora", and what do they have to do with constructing examples of verb tenses or aspects or whatever you choose to call them for classroom use?

MO39 also wrote:
my questions, which have to do more with the words (or should I say "lexical items") employed by fluffyhamster than the concepts they purport to describe.


Yes, the words I am using are in a sense Corpus Linguistics or whatever jargon, but it is sometimes surprising how little the concepts and approach that they describe are actually implemented by teachers (teachers presumably claiming to be offering a reasonably realistic and accurate sampling of the language); there is nowadays no reason* for teachers to need to "construct" examples when there is such a rich source on which to draw or base more authentic/realistic ones. That is of course not to say that teachers should never be allowed to make up examples off the top of their heads, just that there should be no excuse for going into lessons with poor examples simply for want of a little R & D.

*Other than a perverse form of laziness - the new data available should help make teaching easier, and certainly more rewarding, in the sense of being able to do a better job at exemplifying and contextualizing usage. (And yes, I think it is laziness when writers publish, even "just" online, arguably quite dodgy examples! (The test of dodginess is simply, 'Would I or anyone I know say this - would it be easy to use/place/contextualize in normal conversation?')).
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stillnosheep



Joined: 01 Mar 2004
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 05, 2008 11:15 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

lexicalise: (lit.) To make or coin into a word; here: to lexicalise grammar:to clothe a grammatical structure with words so as to form a phrase or sentence

Computerised corpora (sing: corpus): bodies (collections of examples) of language use normally based on a statistical analysis of how language is really used which are held on computers

The fluffy one is right. Given free, easily accesible, computerised corpora, why teach grammar using examples that a student is likely never to encounter, let alone wish to use, in real life, unless of course the teacher is doing it deliberately e.g. introducing absurd, but grammatically accurate, lexis to liven up an otherwise dry lesson or to make a point more memorable?

'Lexicalise' is a lot simpler and quicker to write than 'to clothe a grammatical structure with words so as to form a phrase or sentence' or something similar, when we are discussing how to choose words and phrases (lexis) to exemplify gramatical structures.
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gaijinalways



Joined: 29 Nov 2005
Posts: 2279

PostPosted: Sat Dec 06, 2008 1:05 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

waxwing posted
Quote:
By the time you get to the launderette tomorrow morning at 9:30, your towels will have been being washed for 20 minutes.


Again, I would never say this. Is this acceptable in British, Australian, Kiwi, or S. African English?

More likely, I would say "By the time you get to the lauderette tomorrow morning at 9:30, your towels will have been washing/washed for 20 minutes." You don't need 'being' in there.


Fluffy, I don't find anything wrong with Azar's either. I also have Swan's book as well.

Yes, checking with a corpus is a good idea, though the corpora are primarily for the written language, which does differ in some instances quite a bit from the spoken one.
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fluffyhamster



Joined: 13 Mar 2005
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PostPosted: Sat Dec 06, 2008 1:43 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Well, like Johnslat said of him and I, 'I guess we're going to have to disagree about Azar', me and you (Gaijinalways) now too! Wink Cool

Quote:
Yes, checking with a corpus is a good idea, though the corpora are primarily for the written language, which does differ in some instances quite a bit from the spoken one.


Again, I find that a little surprising coming from an ESL teacher (no wonder you guys don't mind examples that I now - hell, ALWAYS HAVE, even before I "got into" Corpus Linguistics* - run away from screaming!). Granted, many corpora are pretty skewed towards writing, because it is much easier to scan/dump already-existing print into a computer (this is one reason why I went off COBUILD a bit - good luck to them in breaking the 1 billion word barrier whilst amassing the Bank of English and now the Collins Word Web!). The BNC however has a sizeable spoken component (lots of volunteers across the whole British demographic went around wearing high-quality walkmen for days and recording their conversations, which were then painstakingly transcribed, at no small cost, in order to enable computerized analysis - shame that speech recognition software isn't up to the task like human ears still are!), which is clearly represented in the third edition onwards of the LDOCE at least (note the frequency given in speech as opposed to writing for those words that appear in the top 3000 words of both or either type - see links below - as well as the overall excellence of the Longman examples generally); then, there is the valuable work done by Carter & McCarthy of CANCODE fame, which culminated in their relatively recent Cambridge Grammar of English. And let's not forget smaller and older, but still valuable corpora such as the London-Lund Corpus of English Conversation (see for example http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=fo4AAAAACAAJ&dq ).

http://www.pearsonlongman.com/ldoce/pdfs/samp_sprd.pdf
http://www.pearsonlongman.com/ldoce/pdfs/samp_entry.pdf

http://www.pearsonlongman.com/dictionaries/corpus/index.html
> http://www.pearsonlongman.com/dictionaries/corpus/spoken-BNC.html etc

Actually, if a sentence seems weird, there is usually no need to check it in a corpus - you can probably ditch it right away (unless you are doing some earth-shattering but comparatively leisurely research, rather than preparing under pressure for an impending lesson!). The problem rather is in finding sentences that sound "just right", and I think it is worth the effort to hunt them down than try to invent them.

But HEY, native-speaker teachers at least may well be able to learn a fair bit about grammar (though I'm tempted to put that word in scare quotes, thus: "grammar"; "structure") from the likes of Azar, so I am not saying that invented sentences cannot serve any useful purpose. I just hope that people move on at some point to using clearly more empirically-based stuff, is all.

* I guess you could say that I was a 'born functional grammarian' or something! Very Happy


Last edited by fluffyhamster on Sun Dec 14, 2008 2:43 pm; edited 3 times in total
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Marcoregano



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PostPosted: Sat Dec 06, 2008 3:42 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Yawn! What time's the next ferry?
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fluffyhamster



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PostPosted: Sat Dec 06, 2008 3:59 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Marcoregano wrote:
Yawn! What time's the next ferry?


Sorry if you're the choir and I'm preaching to you, M, but there do seem to be some souls to save and demons to exorcize on this here thread! (Yup, I've been "inspired" by Apparitions (episode four was shown on BBC1 last night)). Out, foul Azar! (Non-empiricist teachers start babbling in tongues/incoherent decontextualized sentences). Laughing

stillnosheep wrote:
lexicalise: (lit.) To make or coin into a word; here: to lexicalise grammar:to clothe a grammatical structure with words so as to form a phrase or sentence

('Lexicalise' is a lot simpler and quicker to write than 'to clothe a grammatical structure with words so as to form a phrase or sentence' or something similar, when we are discussing how to choose words and phrases (lexis) to exemplify gramatical structures.)

Computerised corpora (sing: corpus): bodies (collections of examples) of language use normally based on a statistical analysis of how language is really used which are held on computers


Thanks for the definitions, and your comments generally, SNS! Your definition of 'to lexicalise' is spot-on! Here are a few definitions relating to corpora:

corpus (pl. corpora) : a collection of naturally-occuring language texts in electronic form, often compiled according to specific design criteria, and typically containing many millions of words (Halliday et al, Lexicology and Corpus Linguistics)

corpus linguistics: the study of linguistic phenomena through the analysis of corpora (Michael Pearce, The Routledge Dictionary of English Language Studies); linguistic investigations based upon corpora (Trask, The Penguin Dictionary of English Grammar)

"The study of corpora presents many advantages. Instead of consulting our intuitions, or of extracting information painstakingly from speakers a bit at a time, we can examine a very large body of material which has been produced spontaneously by speakers or writers, and hence we can make accurate observations about the real linguistic behaviour of real people. Corpora can thus provide us with highly reliable information about the facts of a language, free of judgements and opinions. ..... ((A)ll corpora must be tagged for at least their words' parts of speech before they can be used successfully, and a human investigator is usually needed to tag those words that an automated tagger has failed to distinguish (but automated taggers consistently attain accuracy rates of over 90%))." (Based on the entry for 'corpus' in Trask's Key Concepts in Language and Linguistics).

Obviously corpus linguists have more faith in performance data than many linguists in the heyday of Chomskyan research did (see the competence-performance so-called dichotomy etc).


Last edited by fluffyhamster on Tue Apr 14, 2009 10:55 pm; edited 1 time in total
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stillnosheep



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PostPosted: Sat Dec 06, 2008 11:39 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

gaijinalways wrote:
waxwing posted
Quote:
By the time you get to the launderette tomorrow morning at 9:30, your towels will have been being washed for 20 minutes.


Again, I would never say this. Is this acceptable in British, Australian, Kiwi, or S. African English?

More likely, I would say "By the time you get to the lauderette tomorrow morning at 9:30, your towels will have been washing/washed for 20 minutes." You don't need 'being' in there.

Are you sure?

"By the time you get to the lauderette tomorrow morning at 9:30, your towels will have been washed for 20 minutes" is wrong. The towels aren't washed (=clean), they are still being washed.

"By the time you get to the launderette tomorrow morning at 9:30, your towels will have been washing for 20 minutes" is better, but, to my (English) ears, still doesn't seem quite right: washing machines wash, towels don't; towels are washed; . On the other hand "the towels are drying on the line" sounds fine, even though one could argue that, when on lines at least, towels don't dry, they are dried (by the wind and sun). Nonetheless the "towels have been washing", while a common construction, doesn't sound quite right.

The original phrase is grammatically faultless, but sounds fussy; the alternatives sound natural, but don't (quite) express what we want. The problem is the decision to use the verb 'to wash' in the first place. No tense/tense+mood/tense+mood+aspect(s) seems quite to get the job done, which sounds better than 'do the job', which may give us a clue.

By the time you get to the lauderette tomorrow morning at 9:30, your towels will have been in the wash for 20 minutes.

Similarly,

by the time we get to the end of this thread, our grammar will have been under discussion (better than 'being discussed') for many posts.

My instinct is that English speakers avoid perfect progressive passive constructions, preferring to use constructions that include a prepositional phrase. Unfortunately the corpora are not yet searchable by non-lexicalised (delexicalised?) grammatical constructions, so I am unable to check my intuition about actual usage with the evidence in the corpora.


Last edited by stillnosheep on Sun Dec 07, 2008 10:18 am; edited 1 time in total
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Stephen Jones



Joined: 21 Feb 2003
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PostPosted: Sun Dec 07, 2008 8:41 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Quote:
Unfortunately the corpora are not yet searchable by non-lexicalised (delexicalised?) grammatical constructions
They are.
http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/
http://www.americancorpus.org/

In the COCA there are twelve hits for 'been being + past participle' as opposed to 130,000 for 'been + past participle' so your intuitions are largely correct.
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stillnosheep



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PostPosted: Sun Dec 07, 2008 10:05 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thank you. I realised my mistake when getting up this morning but was too late to correct it before being found out. I should have said that the corpora are not searchable solely by (delexicalised) structure. Your example shows how easy it is to use the corpora for checking even our intuitions concerning such structure. The fact that I didn't indicates perhaps how ingrained is our habit of relying upon instinct alone, even when arguing that we no longer have an excuse for doing so.

Nonetheless, as you say, the existence of only twelve 'been being + past participle' structures compared to the 130 000 'been + past participle' structures indicates that overwhelmingly another construction is used when we wish to express the sense carried by such structures.
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gaijinalways



Joined: 29 Nov 2005
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PostPosted: Sun Dec 07, 2008 1:16 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Stillnosheep,

Thanx for the correction, 'your towels will have been washing for 20 minutes' does sound better, though I agree, your suggested 'By the time you get to the lauderette tomorrow morning at 9:30, your towels will have been in the wash for 20 minutes.' sounds even better as a construction.

Quote:
The original phrase is grammatically faultless, but sounds fussy


Sorry, I still say no one would use it. That 'By the time you get to the launderette tomorrow morning at 9:30, your towels will have been being washed for 20 minutes.' That 'being' doesn't belong in there. why a double 'be' verb construction?
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waxwing



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PostPosted: Sun Dec 07, 2008 2:37 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Yes, it does belong in there. It's passive. The towels do not wash, they are washed.
Come on, it's not that complicated! Laughing

The first be (been) is part of the perfect progressive or perfect continuous if you prefer (I have been doing X). The second is the passive.
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