The undersung "and"

​The undersung "and"

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A sign seen recently in Tashkent.

I was adding a little section on fuzzy and fuzziness to my  #AfterIELTS course book last week – it is currently on p.72 but that may change between now and its imminent publication. The word fuzzy sounds about as academic as chunk, yet both are revered linguistic concepts. Anyway, whilst writing about fuzzy, I was reminded of the “and” relationship that conspicuously appears in most #wordsketches of most words. Without an awareness of this mighty relationship, however, it is easily overlooked. Conspicuous is it not.

​Wordsketches in #SkELL include a table of words that occur in texts after the target word plus “and”. For example,

• fuzzy and indistinct
• fuzzy and imprecise
• fuzzy and vague
• fuzzy and unclear.

​If your understanding of the word fuzzy is a little hazy, you can certainly sense its place in semantic space from the other words. This is a nice example of negative prosody. On the other hand, there is another set of words with fuzzy that manifests positive prosody:

• warm and fuzzy
• furry and fuzzy
• cuddly and fuzzy
• cute and fuzzy.

None of these eight combinations occur frequently enough in SkELL's billion word corpus to be anointed chunks. English can certainly boast many very high frequency “and” chunks, such as:

• first and foremost
• tried and tested
• doom and gloom
• chalk and talk
• part and parcel
• pen and paper
• trials and tribulations.

With their poetic alliteration and their internal rhyming scheme, these are chunks with their own semantic and pragmatic functions in the language.

Our fuzzy examples, however, are properties of the word. Make a word sketch for pretty much any noun, verb, adjective, or adverb in the English language and you will find words that and links it with. The more arcane the word, the more arcane the partners. See arcane, for example.

Search for words that are in a text you are studying or on a word list you are working with. Explore the "and" relationship by clicking on a word to see it in sentence examples. For example, in the "and" relationship of class, we see among others:

• gender
• category
• method.

Clicking on gender shows 40 example sentences that include class and gender. This must be more than a lexical relationship – it is cultural and political.

Clicking on category shows 40 sentences related to categorisation. Once again, this represents the way this topic is written and spoken about.

Remember that we do not need to read and grasp the sentence examples that corpus searches yield. A concordance page is not a text – it is a source of language data that we skim and scan to identify patterns of normal usage from which we learn how the language works so that our use of the foreign language approximates that of the many native speakers whose output has turned up in the corpus.

The "and" pattern, connecting two words of the same part of speech and with similar semantics, often offers lexical support. Rather than expressing something new, this quasi repetition reinforces the meaning or general impression being communicated. This is particularly noticeable with subjective and emotive words. Look at the "and" relationships of:

• angry
• funny
• modest

There is also the matter of word order. Words in these and relationships are usually said in a set order.

• Coffee and tea is much less frequent than tea and coffee.
• Compare and contrast vs. contrast and compare.
• When and where vs. where and when.
• Reading and writing  vs. writing and reading.

As language teachers and speakers of foreign languages, we are always interested in the properties of words. Knowing a word’s patterns of normal usage is key to using words as native speakers do. And the confidence that emerges from this knowledge impacts on fluency.

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