1. Does the word
“synonym” have a
synonym?
Leo Selivan
British Council
Annual ETAI Conference
3-4 July 2012
2. Outline
• A bit of history
• Latinate and Germanic words
• Lexical density
• Synonyms or near synonyms?
• Multi-part verbs
• Teaching implications & practical suggestions
3. Latinate words
Latinate = derived from Latin or Old French
Latinate affixes Latinate roots
-able, -ible -dict-
-ance -pel
-fy, -ify -pend-
-ment -scrib/script-
-sion, -tion -tract-
-ty, -ity -vert-
4. TASK 1
Look at a page from the dictionary.
• Count the number of words on the page.
• How many Latinate words can you find?
9. French influence
didn’t replace Germanic words
but went to coexist side by side
feeling / sensation
brotherly / fraternal
ring / (tele)phone
fast / rapid
job / occupation
help / assist
begin / commence
end / finish
flood / inundate
10. TASK 2
Make a list of 10 (near-) synonyms in English
• Most are based on Germanic/French
distinction
11. Synonyms within
sets
Germanic / Germanic Latinate / Latinate
• go / walk • mansion / villa
• start / begin • ascend / mount
• home / house
13. Largest vocabulary?
How many words are there in English?
The Global Language Monitor in 2009:
English passed 1 million word mark
Oxford Dictionaries:
250,000 at the very least
14. Nuances vs economy
invite
book
להזמין
reserve
order
It’s my treat / It’s on me
15. Lexical abundance
Cherokee: 20 verbs for wash (hands, face)
Hebrew: different verbs to describe
the harvest of different types of produce
Lexical voids
English: One word for know
(cf. German: wissen / erkennen
French: savoir / connaitre)
20. Phrasal verbs vs.
Latinate
“equivalents”
bring about
find out
look into
put out
put up (with)
set up
take in
21. Phrasal verbs vs.
Latinate
“equivalents”
bring about cause
find out discover
look into investigate
put out extinguish
put up (with) tolerate, endure
set up found, establish
take in deceive
31. Register, style &
domain
ic
en n de
m .
po
k
ic tio ws a isc
S F Ne Ac M
investigate 15 21 85 97 58
look into 18 38 12 4 9
Occurrences per million words
36. Colligation
Grammatical context of a word or
grammatical function it prefers
Don’t be taken in by their promises
It was founded in (year) by (person)
41. Look up Bilingual dictionary -
meaning
twice
Monolingual dictionary -
increase their depth of
meaning
Learner dictionaries:
Macmillan
Cambridge
photo by eltpics on Flickr
Longman
(all three available online)
42. Present a word
(or a pair )
All you know about a word
- meaning and connotations
- grammar
- contexts, collocations
- frequency
- etymology
From Ur, P. (2012). Vocabulary Activities
44. Use corpus and
concordances
British National Corpus (BNC)
Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA)
http://corpus.byu.edu/
Just the word - a tool for looking up collocations
www.just-the-word.com
45.
46. Conclusion
“As near synonyms usually differ in their
collocational behaviour and semantic
prosodies, the traditional practice of explaining
meanings to learners by offering synonyms
should be used with caution”
Xiao & Mcenery (2006)
47. References
Barber, C. (1993). The English Language. Cambridge: CUP
Davies, M. (2004-). BYU-BNC: The British National Corpus. Available at http://
corpus.byu.edu/bnc
Gardner, D. & Davies, M. (2007). Pointing out frequent phrasal verbs: A corpus-based
analysis. In TESOL Quarterly 41(2), pp 339-359
Hoey, M. (2000). A World Beyond Collocation: New Perspectives on Vocabulary
Teaching. In Lewis. M (ed.), Teaching Collocation: Further Developments in the
Lexical Approach. (pp. 224-243). Hove: Thomson-Heinle
McCrum, R., Cran, W. & MacNeil, R. (2002). The Story of English. London: Penguin.
Schuessler, J. (2009, June 13). Keeping It Real on Dictionary Row. The New York Times.
Retrieved from
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/weekinreview/14shuessler.html?_r=2
Ur, P. (2012). Vocabulary activities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Welcome to the World of Global English. (2010, February 24). The Global Language
Monitor. Retrieved from http://www.languagemonitor.com/
Xiao, R. & McEnery, T. (2006). Collocation, Semantic Prosody, and Near Synonymy: A
Cross-Linguistic Perspective. Applied Linguistics, 27(1), 103-129