Phraseological patterning and collocation

The fact that words tend to co-occur, resulting in collocations and phraseological patterns, illustrates the close relationship between grammar and lexis. Patterns are grammatical constructions involving clear restric-tions on word choice. For example, when we ‘get down to’ something, it is usually something serious and/or detailed, such as ‘business’, ‘work’

or ‘the specifics’. The choice of words that can follow ‘get down to’ is therefore restricted. Metaphoric and metonymic expressions exhibit a particularly strong tendency to develop such fixed patterning (Deignan and Potter, 2004). It is crucial that language learners respond to and pro-duce this patterning, yet it often appears to pose a serious problem, and knowledge of it frequently lags far behind vocabulary knowledge (Bahns and Eldaw, 1993; Howarth, 1996). Moreover, when learners realise that they need to use collocations, they have repeatedly been found to avoid them (Philip, 2005), or create elaborate paraphrases (Gabrys-Biskup, 1992). Patterns tend to be treated as unimportant by cognitive linguists and have so far not formed part of the empirical studies of figurative lan-guage learning we have examined. Above and beyond methods found useful with vocabulary learning in general, we thus have very little idea of what is pedagogically effective.

There are occasions where the literal and the figurative senses of a word seem to be associated with fairly fixed distinct grammatical patterns:

Literal The light reflected off the roof The crystal reflected the light Figurative She reflected (calmly) for a moment

He reflected (on life or the fact that life was miserable) He reflected ruefully that he should have resigned.

In many other cases, the situation is more complicated. Table 8.1 illustrates a number of literal and figurative examples of ‘leak’ taken from the Bank of English. These examples show that figurative ‘leak’ shares some constructions with literal ‘leak’, but that it has some constructions resembling those of a verb like ‘tell’ (or better, ‘communicate’ or

‘divulge).⁴This sort of partial sharing is not rare. It recurs with, for example,

‘reveal’, where you can literally ‘reveal a leg’ or figuratively ‘reveal a secret’ (in both an agentive and non-agentive sense), but you can only

‘reveal that X’ figuratively. As ‘leak’ or ‘reveal’ are transferred figuratively to mean ‘communicate’, they transfer not only some of their meanings and implications, but also some of their grammatical structure. However, since they also take on structure associated with ‘communicate’, the result would appear to be a grammatical, as well as a semantic or conceptual, blend from which new features emerge (see Chapter 3).

This does not dovetail neatly with the idea of conceptual metaphor, where the actual words employed do not matter, so given the current state of our knowledge, perhaps teachers should teach conceptual and linguistic blending as analogous processes.

Table 8.1 Literal and figurative ‘leak’

Literal Figurative

A leak from an underground petrol A leak from the Pentagon tank

Hydrogen fuel has leaked out The secret has leaked out A leak-proof package A leak-proof guarantee It leaked oil all over the place. –

– Washington leaked the fact that

– A widely leaked email

– The news was leaked by employees

– When word leaked out that

Another problem for conceptual explanations is restrictions on word class. Table 8.2 represents a compound problem that university students crucially need to master. The rows give semantic not grammatical matches.

First, there is no English verb to ‘view over’ or ‘to overview’. Second, there is a semantic mismatch between all the verbs and all the nouns. In our experience, even advanced learners remain confused. Exploring the basic senses of, and relations involved in, ‘see’, ‘over’ and ‘oversee’ will generate relevant concepts, but will not help the learner resolve the problem of what form has what meaning. The only pedagogic solution would seem to be to prioritise the forms most likely to be needed (so academic assignments mostly need ‘to overlook’ and offer ‘an overview’) and to teach them directly in context, with support from pictures and corpus lines.

There are also restrictions concerning the types of metonymy that different languages allow. Panther and Thornburg (2003) noted that the RESULT FOR ACTION metonymy seems commoner in English than in German. Thus while English speakers use less agentive result verbs ‘Have your documents ready’ or (more arguably) ‘Stand behind the yellow line’, German speakers use more agentive forms (Halten Si Ihre Dokumente bereit’, literally ‘Hold your documents’, or ‘Stellen Sie sich hinter die gelbe Linie’, literally ‘Put yourself behind the line’).

Cross-linguistic differences are thus important; indeed they add another layer of confusion to examples like ‘leak’. French and Spanish speakers for example cannot use the same verbs for transitive and intransitive leaking. Nesselhauf’s (2003) study of German learners of English found that, in general, learning problems arose where L1–L2 collocations were different, rather than when they were similar, suggesting that collocations are (a) psychologically real, (b) below the level of consciousness in many cases and (c) transferred to the L2 by language learners. Nesselhauf also considers cross-linguistic sense differentiation, and cites a German student who wrote ‘draw a picture from [a tree]’ – German ‘von’ means ‘from’ or ‘of’. In this case, a conceptual explana-tion might help; Lindstromberg (1998) argues that in English ‘of’

consistently highlights a connection between two things, while ‘from’

highlights their separation. This explanation seems reasonably valid for Table 8.2 Seeing and looking over

Verb Noun Sense

oversee – Be in charge of overlook oversight Forget to do something look over overview Have a general idea

English, and does explain why you can say ‘made from paper’ or ‘made of paper’, but ‘this is made from old paper by a process of compression’

would sound odd with ‘of’.

8.9 Conclusion

Though educators like Holme (2001; 2004) have suggested using schemata of journeys and spaces to teach English tense/aspect via direct bodily experience, empirical studies of figurative learning have thus far tended to ignore grammatical phenomena. It is, however, clear that metaphor and metonymy are involved in a range of grammatical phenomena which learners of English need to be able to understand and use. In some cases a motivated, conceptual account can be given, which can serve to reduce the apparent arbitrariness of the grammar and, on the evidence of the phrasal verb studies, increase learner motivation. In other cases, where collocation and patterning are involved, a few gener-alisations are possible (e.g., ‘Verb⫹ that …’ structures tend to imply mental events or communicating), but teaching needs to retain a phraseological focus. Ultimately, the conceptual and the linguistic both need to be acquired and to that end we proposed the notion of grammatical blending as a parallel to conceptual blending.

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