Hunston Ch. 6. Corpora and language teaching: Issues of language description
FIND ANSWERS TO THESE QUESTIONS
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According to Hunston, what twofold impact have corpora had on language teaching?
Language as phraseology
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What is phraseology and how does it manifest?
What is the relation between phraseology and variation?
How does Hunston define ‘phrases’ and how are they different from ‘phraseology’?
What are the consequences of adopting Sinclair’s view of phraseology?
What is the relationship between patterns and meanings? Give an example.
Is it easier or more difficult to learn phraseology rather than isolated words?
What can be said about the semantics of expressions sharing the same pattern? Give an
example.
How can patterns help track language change?
What unit is meaning attached to?
When can semantic prosody be observed? What units can semantic prosody characterise?
What is the idiom principle? What are its features? Who coined the term? How does it
differ from the open-choice principle? What is the relation between both principles?
Explain the notion of phrase overlap (aka ‘pattern flow’ or ‘collocation cascade’)
What is the problem with the practical application of the idiom principle, and what
solution does Hunston offer? Try to illustrate with an example.
Where are the boundaries of phraseology? How pervasive is it in language?
What is Sinclair’s view on the lexis-grammar dichotomy? What arguments support his
position? How does corpus linguistics help dismantle the 3 basic observations sanctioning
the grammar-lexis separation?
What is ‘pattern grammar’?
Does phraseology help explain (and teach) or does it only observe what happens in
language (i.e. describe)?
How can phraseologies be applied in teaching? Give an example.
What is ‘local grammar’?
Language variation
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How have corpora deepened our knowledge of language variation?
What variable / sites of variation can be traced?
Why is the name Biber important in connection with corpus-based variation studies?
What are (some of) Biber’s parameters of variation?
Give 2-3 examples of feature frequency variation in English.
What does the multi-factor, multi-dimensional analysis help establish?
What are some of the conclusions reached by Biber in his work?
What is the place of variation in language description?
Is phraseology a radical approach?