Unit 4: Lexical patterns

Activity 1: Collocation

Read:

Some words co-occur together. Some words do not. Words that have a higher chance of co-occurring are said to collocate. Collocation is a statistical measure of whether the words tend to co-occur.

Work with a partner. Decide which of the following show collocation. Be prepared to explain your choices.

1. black and pink
2. black and white
3. white and black
4. black eye
5. glass eye
6. sit on a chair
7. sit on a table
8. slip on a banana skin
9. slip on a potato

Check the frequency of exact matches in Google by searching for each of the expressions above using quotation marks, e.g. "black and pink".

The relative frequencies should approximate to the strength of collocation. The more common items will have a higher collocation.

Activity 2: Cohesion

Read:

Cohesion describes the linking within a sentence or a text. Cohesion can be grammatical, e.g. though pronouns. Cohesion can be lexical, e.g. through synonyms.

Identify the cohesive devices (i.e. instances of cohesion) in the following paragraph, taken from Campus life, a webpage of our university.

The University of Aizu is located in a suburb of Aizu-Wakamatsu City, a castle town with a population of 120,000. Surrounded by rural fields, this University is situated in a splendid environment of abundant green. Many University students reside in Aizu-Wakamatsu City while they are students. It is not a large city, and bicycles are a convenient means of transportation.

Commentary: Cohesion is achieved mainly by refering to the institution, location and scenery in different ways.

• Institution: The University of Aizu (twice), this university
• Location: Aizu-Wakamatsu City (twice), a castle town, It
• Scenery: Rural fields, enivornment of abundant green

Activity 3: Coherence

Read:

Coherence refers to the connection between the sequences of utterances or chunks of text. If a text is coherent, it is possible to follow the logical flow of the text. If the text is incoherent, a mistake may have been made or the text is non-sensical.

Work with a partner. Decide which of the following show coherence.

1. The cow jumped over the moon.
2. Tom saw a sheep on the sea.
3. The dog ran down the street with a bone in its mouth.
4. The US dollar dropped sharply against the Japanese yen.
5. He got the top score and so he failed the course.
6. I said bye to the trouble and strife and saucepan lids, and then got in my jam jar.

Commentary: When the meaning of the sentence does not match your knowledge of the real world, it is likely that the sentence is not coherent. Howver, it could also be that a secret code is being used in which a word is assigned a different meaning and so those who do not know the code find it incoherent but those who do find it coherent. For example, I use the word "Black Hat" to refer to the fastfood chain "McDonald's", and so if you are in Japan, you should now be able to understand the sentence "Black Hat is next to Yellow Hat."

• Coherent: Sentences 1, 2 and 5
• Incoherent: Sentence 3 and 4
• Code: Sentence 6. This is written in a code called Cockney Rhyming slang, and so the sentence means: I said by to the wife and kids, and then got in my car.

Activity 4: Collocations

Watch and listen to this explanation of collocation and learn some common collocations (8 min 21 sec).

Activity 5: Cohesion and coherence

Watch and listen to this explanation of how to develop cohesion and coherence in essays (7 min 47 sec).

Knowledge and application

Activity 6: Identifying lexical patterns

Identify the collocation, cohesion and coherence within this description of a chart, both of which were sourced from the British Council website. Submit a pdf with your analysis via ELMS.

The first chart illustrates the percentage of the population who owned a smartphone from 2011 to 2016, and the second breaks the percentages down by age for 2011 and 2016.

Overall, smartphone ownership increased during the six-year period. In general, the younger people were, the more likely they were to own a smartphone. However, the most significant increases in smartphone ownership between 2011 and 2016 came from people aged 45 to 54, from 46% to 84%; from those in the 55 to 64 category, from 9% to 59%; and from those aged 65 to 74, from 5% to 50%.

The percentage of people who owned a smartphone rose steadily, starting at around 35% in 2011 and reaching about 77% by 2016. People aged 16 to 24 represented the greatest percentage of smartphone ownership in both 2011 and 2016. 75% of people aged 25 to 34 and 72% of those aged 35 to 44 owned a smartphone in 2011, rising to 88% and 86% respectively by 2016.

Although almost nobody in the 75+ age category owned a smartphone in 2011, 15% of this group owned smartphones in 2016.