The first language of most learners of English does not have the <th> sounds – voiced or unvoiced. So this is one of the very first things I work on with students, especially if they have been learning English for a long time and are still pronouncing <th> as /d/ or /t/ or /f/ or /s/.
​
Another thing I like to teach my students in the early stages of a course is the importance of chunks. In the process, I capitalize on the fact that many chunks also function in grammar patterns.

I asked ChatGPT for ten passive sentences about the topic of connectionism. As usual, the sentences are bland and inauthentic. But this is one  was also problematic.

• Complex behaviors can emerge from the interaction of interconnected nodes in connectionist networks.

When I pointed out that this sentence has no passive voice, it apologized for the oversight and offered this instead.

• Complex behaviors can be emerged from the interaction of interconnected nodes in connectionist networks.

When I pointed out that emerged doesn't work in the passive in English, it told me that I was correct and offered me this.

• Complex behaviors can be observed to emerge from the interaction of interconnected nodes in connectionist networks.

When I pointed out that the infinitive form after observed doesn't work in English, it told me I was right again, and offered me this:

• Complex behaviors can be observed emerging from the interaction of interconnected nodes in connectionist networks.

So, how many words are in this sentence?

• During the fight, each combatant attempts to strike at the enemy without being struck.

Did you count strike and struck as one word or two? Did you count the twice?

If our definition of a word is a string of letters surrounded by a space or punctuation, it is the same as our computer’s word counts. These are known as orthographic words. We count strike and struck as two word forms of the lemma strike.  The other word forms are strikes, striking, stricken.

We can distinguish tokens - the number of orthographic words  in a sentence or text from types - the number of different word forms. 

In the next sentence, strike is a noun and a verb. This is variously known as conversion and zero derivation. These are different lemmas – a lemma is the set of word forms of one part of speech.  The noun lemma is strike, strikes. 

• The flight attendants ended their strike the following day, but the others continued to strike.

Is flight attendant one word or two? In the next sentence, we have a phrasal verb and a compound adjective. 

• The guys who never strike out much have the best two-strike approach.  ​

​
The two orthographic words create these lexemes, i.e. units of meaning. Lexemes can be single words or compounds. Flight attendant is a compound noun, i.e. a lexeme. It is not a collocation because the two words in a collocation retain their individual meanings, e.g. end strike in the second sentence and good approach in the third – best being part of the lemma ​good.

The set of word forms that are formed from a single word are a word family. If you fill the Taxonomy of Morphology with all the word forms of strike, you will have depicted its word family. In addition to the word forms of strike we have already seen, it might include misstrike, overstrike, outstrike, pre-strike, re-strike, strikeout, strike-through, striker, striking (adj), strikingly.

This may seem like a lot of trouble to go to to answer a question about the number of words in a sentence. In fact, counting words is just a task that draws attention to the issue. Having a superior conceptual grasp of “word” allows students to complete the Taxonomy of Morphology for any lexical items they are studying. Ideally they would observe them whilst reading, listening and watching and add them to their stunningly visual or visually stunning vocabulary notebooks. This would be the impetus for seeking out more word forms of a target word. ​

Halliday considered the term lexical item less indeterminate than the folk-definition of word as he called it. Our students deserve more than the folk definition. They don’t have folk definitions of concepts of physics, chemistry, biology, literary devices and other conceptual networks that they study at secondary school and beyond. They don’t even have folk definitions of the passive voice, articles, conditionals, subordinate clauses and other grammatical concepts when learning English. Their knowledge of vocabulary is however profoundly superficial.
​
We are not helping our students develop their active vocabulary if they cannot distinguish a collocation from a compound noun, if they do not know the properties of phrasal verbs and delexical verb structures, if they do not know that the relationship between vehicle, car and sedan is systematic, if they are unaware of the patterned use of prepositions with nouns, verbs and adjectives as comprehensively demonstrated in these two books from COBUILD. ​

Their higher order thinking skills are also being exercised when they annotate vocabulary features of whole texts. They can trace the topic trails, the different uses of repeated keywords, the collocations and colligations that the author has used. When the students are engaged in wide reading and observe patterns in the use of key words in CLIL, ESP, EMI or general English projects, they learn their genre and register specific usages. This plays a significant role in acculturating students into the conceptual and linguistic milieu of their field. 
​
Only students can learn vocabulary. Teachers can teach them about vocabulary and provide them many vocabulary learning strategies, many of which depend on an awareness of lemmas and lexemes, types and tokens, collocation and colligation, word templates and topic trails. And the rest! There is much to be done.

​

In my last blog post, "…", I wrote:

• When we search a corpus for "does not a .* make", it is clear that this is a systematic linguistic exploitation, as the great British lexicographer, Patrick Hanks refers to such creative uses of language. 

Since I wrote this, this great British lexicographer has passed away.
 
Patrick's theory was articulated in his unputdownable book Lexical Analysis: Norms and Exploitations (2013). It is an empirical investigation into how words go together in collocation patterns and constructions to make meanings. In the book he writes extensively about patterns of normal usage and then demonstrates how a great deal of creative language use is also patterned, albeit differently. By the time Lexical Analysis was published, I had known Patrick for quite a while during our overlapping years at the Faculty of Computer Science (FI MU Brno). Our offices were on opposite sides of a corridor across which we'd often call to each other.

​Patrick had not been fully apprised of the doctoral defence procedure. Czech doctoral defences are preceded by an oral exam and he more or less delivered his inspired defence during the exam. We had to wait outside the exam room while the committee determined his exam result before allowing him to give his defence, which turned into a grand round table discussion. I remember James Pustejovsky, who'd been flown from the USA for the defence, ramping up Patrick's interrogation by claiming that he was getting off a little bit lightly. He passed.

Before the New Oxford, there was the COBUILD project at Birmingham University in the 1980s. Patrick was the managing editor of the COBUILD Dictionary. I distinctly remember the day he strode the metre and a half from his office to mine to tell me that he'd just learnt of the death of his dear friend and colleague, John Sinclair. Sinclair had run the highly innovative COBUILD project for a decade. Patrick would often relate the day Sinclair announced to his team of lexicographers that all of the dictionary's definitions would be written in full sentences unlike the standard practice of providing synonyms and snippets to express a word's meaning. These sentence definitions are built up of chunks of information that explain what and why and how something means what it means. This aspect of the COBUILD dictionary is why I recommend it to students and teachers in all my training and writing. I shall wax lyrical on this in another post.
 
One Friday afternoon, Patrick drove around the corner from the faculty to the bank, unnecessarily and lamentably. He came back from the bank on foot, his car having been stolen. Unfortunately, he hadn't finished unloading boxes of rare and specialist books from his car into the flat that a friend of mine let to him. The police came and drove Patrick and me around the neighbourhood for quite some time before they took us to the police station where we spent hours answering questions for the policeman to fill in forms. I was interpreting for him and I had to keep asking if cars really have all of these features he was being asked to say yea or nay to. It had been well over 20 years since I had owned a car and half of the features sounded indulgent and verging on sci-fi. He never got his car back let alone the books. But we did spend that Friday evening washing down a hefty steak with a fine Czech brew or two.
 
While still in Brno Patrick started a project that he pursued to the end of his working life. It is the Pattern Dictionary of English Verbs (PDEV), publicly available as an online database. He and his team studied concordances of verbs, tagging their grammatical and lexical features. They used Sketch Engine of course, since it was born and thrives to this day in the faculty where we were working. Sketch Engine achieved an international reach when the philosopher-linguist, Adam Kilgarriff, bought into it through a university–enterprise agreement. Adam died of cancer at the age of 55. In fact, the last time I saw Patrick was at Adam's funeral in Brighton.
 
Here is the entry for adapt in PDEV.

Every meaning/use of a verb has a unique pattern, which is why we know which meaning of a verb is meant when we read or hear it. And we use this information when we write and speak. Native speakers do this subconsciously while non-native speakers learn this, although to the best of my knowledge, there are no vocabulary teaching resources that employ this user-friendly description of meaning. I'm working on it! Watch this space. While an entry does not employ terminology such as valency, complementation or transitivity, it does use semantic types which are indicated in square brackets. The PDEV entry for answer has 14 entries, two of which are tagged phrasal: answer back and answer for and two are tagged idiom: have a lot to answer for and answer call of nature.
 
I participated in the PDEV corpus work for a short time. I was convinced that the searches could be partially automated as I had developed database scripts for automating Sketch Engine CQL searches for verbs in their known grammar patterns as part of my MA dissertation research. But Patrick preferred to work from raw data without skewing observations towards predetermined patterns. He also rejected intuition. There were times when I pointed out that the data did not show something about a verb that should be part of its description.
 
While his interest was in verbs, mine lay in nouns as the primary carriers of meaning in message clauses. I posited applying the PDEV approach to nouns, but Patrick had a completely different methodology for this part of speech. The cognitive profile, as he called it, consists of a set of short, objective sentences each sentence revolving around a collocation of the noun. For example, his spider profile includes these sentences:

• Some species of spiders hunt prey.
• Spiders lurk in the centres of their webs.
• Spiders have eight legs.
• Many people have a dread of or are frightened of spiders.

 
I have adapted this for teaching purposes, preferring the more student-friendly term, word profile. In pedagogical circles, a cognitive profile is more likely to pertain to a student than a word. I'll elaborate in another post.
 
I took him a couple of times to visit the old folks in Mikulov, a beautiful Moravian town on the Austrian border. The old folks were my dear friends, a Czech man and his South African wife, who had lived in my town, Sydney, for 15 years before moving to Czechia after the fall of the wall. We used to chat at the bar in their house, drink carafes of Moravian wine, play Noel and Cole on June's Steinway and stumble home the following day.
 
Patrick did invite me to stay with him for a few days in Bristol during which time he was frantically busy, but we did manage to talk about pattern descriptions of nouns, about his loneliness, his depressive moods, his ex-wife and his beloved daughter.
 
I can't imagine where my thinking about language would be had I not spent this time with Patrick. They were pivotal years for me, and it is a great honour to have been in his presence. You are very well-remembered, dear friend.

Following on from my previous post about constellations, in this post I'm looking at the asterisk, which some of my students refer to as a star. I admit that that's a pretty tenuous connection and I apologise whole-heartedly. But the universe does get a mention here, so bear with me.

I'm drafting a vocabulary workbook at the moment, or should I say yet another vocabulary workbook. In this one, the students are often tasked with discovering how words work in grammar patterns. They mainly use CorpusMate. This is quite a new, free, open-access and superfast corpus tool that was designed by Peter Croswaithe and programmed by Vit Baisa, who also programmed my VersaText and was instrumental in the development of SkELL.

The CorpusMate corpus does not have part of speech tagging, which means that you can't search for a pattern such as Verb + noun + v-ing and there are hundreds of verbs in English that function in this pattern, e.g. remember, picture, catch, tolerate, leave. There are not only hundreds of words, but there are also hundreds of patterns that nouns, verbs and adjectives function in. My current vocabulary book revolves around the COBUILD grammar pattern reference books from the late 1990s. In fact, I wrote my masters dissertation on the grammar patterns of the verbs in the then new Academic Wordlist (2000) that Averil Coxhead had created for her masters dissertation.

It is always interesting to see how much can be gleaned about the grammar pattern of a word without part of speech tags. The asterisk is mighty. In fact, it holds the secret to the meaning of life, the universe and everything. Read on!

A supercomputer called Deep Thought was asked what the meaning of life, the universe and everything was. It calculated that it was 42. See the announcement in this extract from the film. Douglas Adams, the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the cult 1979 novel from which this comes, always claimed that he chose the number 42 randomly. But 42 is the ASCII code for the asterisk, which in computer searches means anything and everything. Did Deep Thought calculate that the meaning of life, the universe and everything is anything and everything?
​
This search uses two asterisks. The first has spaces before and after it, which makes the program search the corpus for all of the words in between the items to the left and the right of it. The second asterisk is used with a dot and is attached to ing. Dot-star, as my students call it. This makes the program search for words ending with ing. While this might include words such as thing and during, the fact is that the -ing word that follows remember followed by another word tends to be an -ing verb. This is the reality of pattern grammar.

As mentioned, Verb + noun + -ing is one of hundreds of grammar patterns of words that the COBUILD team uncovered. They were not the first to identify this or many other patterns, but they were able to demonstrate with large corpora the semantic relationships between words that function in the same pattern. This means that the words in a grammar pattern are related in meaning. Important and interesting.

Chunks
​
Now back to our mighty asterisk! With queries such as these, you can find the frequent chunks that a target word is used in. The concordance extract below shows some things that people are "in search of a". ​

I'm hoping that a vocabulary workbook that has students learning about the patterns that words function in and the words that go in these patterns through tasking them with discovering these properties of words for themselves using CorpusMate and other tools will be a stimulating voyage of discovery which will add a layer of systematicity to their vocabulary study which will in turn lead to them using words with more confidence and fewer hesitations. Think fluency. They might become stars themselves! ​