Chunks = grammar + vocabulary

Although we typically think of vocabulary and grammar as two distinct categories, the lexical approach challenges this false dichotomy. As we shall see, lexical chunks often combine these two categories. This is because words tend to occur with specific grammatical structures. Here are some examples:

The verb hold, in the sense of organise an event, is often used in the passive.

• Québec’s first referendum was held in 1980.
• Council meetings are held every six weeks.
• Secret talks were held in Washington to negotiate a peace treaty. 
• Elections are held roughly every four years.

The adverb ever is often used in questions with the present perfect and in emphatic negative statements.

• Have you ever been to France?
• I don’t remember ever seeing him before.

The modal verb could, when used as a softener to sound less direct and more polite, often co-occurs with the adverb just in questions and requests to sound even more polite.

• Could I just add something?
• Could I just point out that…?

Does this mean that all lexical chunks must contain a lexical and grammatical element? Not necessarily. Still, it’s important to get in the habit of looking for these patterns whenever possible and drawing your learners’ attention to them. In other words, prioritise the highlighting of grammatical patterns when teaching lexical chunks.

How do I get better at noticing the grammar patterns associated with specific words?

Start with dictionary entries, especially dictionaries which are based on corpus data (i.e. data on how the language is actually spoken), such as the Longman online dictionary. Such dictionaries provide model sentences from corpora so that you can see how the word or chunk is used, including any associated grammar patterns. Here’s the entry for hold from Longman. As you can see, of the four sentences the first three are in the passive.

Another excellent option is Skell (Sketch Engine for Language Learning) which allows you to explore how words are used by actual English speakers. (Like Longman, it is corpus-based.)

Here’s a screenshot of the results for hold. Make sure to select the option “word sketch” at the top of the page. This will break down collocations by type. We’re interested in the nouns that collocate with it as an object. If you click on meeting (the first noun on the list) we will see concordances from the corpus, just like the sample sentences in Longman.

As we can see below, out of the twenty concordances containing the collocation hold + meeting, 13 are in the passive. That’s about 66%.

Reflecting on your learning

How likely are you to try using these tools to identify lexical chunks containing embedded grammar? What about your students? What kinds of activities can we create to help them start using dictionary entries and concordances from Skell without leaving them feeling overwhelmed?