What We Know from Phraseology and the Learner’s Dictionary
The Chapter Two Phraseology and the Learner’s Dictionary falls
into eight parts, from which we know some basic knowledge about
the descriptive scheme from the second Interim report on English
collocations, phraseology in A Grammar of English Words,
Collocations and idioms in the Idiomatic and Syntactic English
Dictionary, Dictionaries of English Idioms and Dictionaries of
Collocations and so on.
The Second Interim Report on English Collocations was
published in 1933, which was destined to have a profound and
enduring influence on EFL dictionary-making. It was a major
landmark, and though its significance has been lost sight of at
various times since, it shaped the treatment of phraseology in the
highly innovative dictionaries of Palmer and Hornby, and then, in
combination with other influences, formed the theoretical basis of the
English phraseological dictionaries. A collection of idioms and
phrasal verbs contributed by Hornby formed a major element in the
General Service List produced by Palmer, West, and others as part
of the Interim Report on Vocabulary Selection of 1936, or that
phraseology was to become a central feature of the earliest learners’
dictionaries.
Palmer’s approach to the definition of the category as a whole
was not linguistic but pedagogical. He defined these successions of
words in terms of the learning difficulty they represented and the
approach that needed to be taken to mastering them. He was
unwilling to employ idiom as the terms for his most inclusive category,
since in his view this would have meant broadening its application to
cover proverbs, sayings, and figurative expressions, all of which
featured in the original IRET collection. Palmer spoke with some
scorn of idiom lists and clearly objected to the term itself because of
its loose application to word-combinations of various types and even
to peculiar construction patterns.
Harold Palmer’s A Grammar of English Words, published in
1938, provided the first opportunity to use the material classified in
the Interim Report, and to demonstrate in a practical form the
importance he and Hornby attached to collocations in the learning
and teaching of English. As an additional phraseological category,
GEW introduced the helpful and well-defined phrase, a class made
up of word-combinations, usually of sentence length, which
functioned as conversational formulae, sayings, and proverbs. He
had already written illuminatingly of conversational formulae, and
produced a number of gramophone records illustrating their use.
The Idiomatic and Syntactic English Dictionary, by contrast, was
a general-purpose dictionary for the advanced foreign learner. Yet it
too gave great prominence to phraseology, and deserves close
examination, both because it established precedents for the
subsequent treatment of word-combinations in general EFL
dictionaries and because certain of its features set a pattern for the
phraseological dictionaries. The phraseological research carried out
by Palmer and Hornby, though originally intended for teachers of
English and compilers of restricted vocabularies, was clearly too
valuable to be ignored during the compilation of ISED, and there is
evidence that extensive use was made of it, though material was
drawn from other sources as well.
As the Interim Report indicated, restricted collocations are of
many structural types, but a helpful distinction can be drawn between
lexical and grammatical collocations. The prominence given to
phrases and clauses in ISED and their characteristic structure give
ample support to the view that Hornby assigned specific example
types to particular functions and that the specific function of clauses
and phrases was to serve as simplified lexical frames for
comprehension and sentence building. Cutting across the division
between phrases, clauses and sentence was another characteristic
ISED device. Its purpose was to represent the collocational range
from which the individual collocations of a word are formed.
The first response to the need for a specialized dictionary of
word-combinations came in the late 1950s from Ronald Mackin,
formerly an EFL specialist with the British Council but at the time
teaching in the school of Applied Linguistics at Edinburgh University.
Mackin had assembled initially on paper slips a corpus of some
30000 citations from written texts with the aim of producing a
dictionary of multi-word items that were in the broadest sense
collocations. Mackin was well aware of the analytical problems on
several levels that faced anyone venturing into the domain of
phraseology.
The first dictionary of English collocations worthy of the name
was published in Warsaw in 1982. SEC provides a bare minimum of
grammatical labels and no information on style or meaning. Each
collocation in SEC contains at least one noun and a noun features in
every case as the headword.
The description of collocations and idioms, as developed at
IRET, had certain characteristic which, positively and negatively,
were to influence the later treatment of phraseology in learner’s
dictionaries. The grammar-centered approach of the pioneers was,
however, one of the primary factors leading to the introduction of
syntactic transformation into the specialized idiom dictionaries of the
1970s and 1980s. The treatment of word-combinations of various
kinds, including phrasal verbs, in the multi-purpose EFL dictionary
after ISED is a different strand in the general evolution, all of which
contribute greatly to the development of the history of dictionaries.