Do concordances require to

be consulted?
Charles Owen
Descriptive
linguistics and
teaching
Recent research in corpus linguistics has suggested that our intuitions
about language are too unreliable to be used as a basis for prescription,
whereas consulting 'the evidence' in a corpus will be much more reliable.
This article begins by revisiting the debate on linguistics and prescription,
with particular reference to corpus linguistics. It then describes an en-
counter with a large corpus, and concludes that intuitive prescription, far
from being a disreputable activity, is an essential and desirable aspect of
language teaching which does not depend on corpus evidence for its in-
tegrity.
For most of history language teachers have not questioned their role as
prescribers of correct language and proscribers of incorrect language.
Indeed, the perceived professional ability of teachers is very much
bound up with their command of correct language, so that doubt or
hesitation in delivering judgement is normally taken for ignorance rather
than wisdom. It is a basic premise of this paper that these ideas about
correctness, and thus of prescription, are a psychological reality for all
learners. This includes sophisticated learners who happen to have
studied linguistics.
Linguistics has a problem with prescription. Every elementary textbook
informs its readers that the job of the linguist is to describe rather than
prescribe. This injunction is common to all approaches, whether
psycholinguistic or corpus based. The suspicion, contempt even, with
which prescription is regarded by linguistics has, I think, been reinforced
recently by developments in corpus linguistics, since concordances give
their users an impression that the gulf between what people think the
language consists of, and what they actually say or write, is very wide:
The contrast exposed between the impressions of language detail
noted by people, and the evidence compiled objectively from texts is
huge and systematic. (Sinclair 1991: 4)
Observations on discrepancies between descriptions of language and
actual performance are, of course, hardly new, particularly in respect of
spoken performance. Crystal (1979), for example, argues that many
'neglected features' of spoken language should be incorporated into
standard descriptions, and that the only way to do that is to collect
examples. What is distinctive about some recent work is the way in
which it treats knowledge of language as ineligible data for description,
and thus also as an ineligible basis for prescription. According to this
ELT Journal Volume 50/3 July 1996 Oxford University Press 1996 219
view, while individual knowledge of language may have curiosity value
for the 'real' linguist, rather like the long discredited theory of humours,
it has no basis in fact, is worthless for descriptive purposes, and is thus
unsound as a basis for prescription:
The way a person conceptualizes language and expresses this
conceptualization is of great importance and interest precisely
because it is not in accordance with the newly observed facts of
usage. (Sinclair 1991: 4)
Prescriptive studies fall into disrepute only when they ignore or
become detached from the evidence, (ibid.: 61)
Not all corpus linguists take such a narrow view of the relationship
between intuition, description, and prescription. Aarts (1991) argues
that description needs to take into account not only observed frequency
of occurrence in a corpus, but also the concept of 'normalcy', which is
admittedly hard to define, but which clearly relates to speakers' attitudes
to the language. I suggest that the practical concerns of the typical
language teacher are much more likely to be served by this more flexible
view.
Prescription in L2 In L2 pedagogy, prescription ought not to be all that controversial. One
teaching well-known elementary textbook makes a point of distinguishing
prescriptive (LI) from teaching (L2) grammars (Fromkin and Rodman
1988), and condemns the former. It is not clear that the distinction is
anything like as sharp as the authors claim, but it is certainly true that
most L2 learners fully expect prescription. After all, what is the business
of a language teacher if not to enable the learner to speak the language
as correctly as possible? This is not an issue of accuracy versus fluency .
It is simply that all L2 learners, deep down, believe it to be part of their
task to improve their accuracy, whereas most native-speaker learners do
not. Moreover, most L2 work is still free of worry about prescribing
inappropriately in the context of a local varietyyou only have to talk
for five minutes to a teacher of, say, French or German in Britain to find
yourself in a rather comforting world, in which there is just one 'correct'
version of the language which learners have to master.
Matters are not always so simple, of course. It is usual (in Britain at
least) to distinguish between EFL and ESL, and in the latter category to
distinguish further between countries where the target language is not
the mother tongue of the majority (e.g. Singapore) and countries where
it is (e.g. Britain), (cf. definitions in Richards et al. 1985). Our view of
prescription may be influenced by the category of teaching we think we
are engaging in. Whereas Singapore English or Nigerian English are
now well-established sociolinguistic concepts, Danish English is not.
Speaker B's reply in the following exchange would be clearly deviant in
Denmark, as it is in Britain, but less obviously so in Singapore:
A: They've opened a new McDonald's just round the corner.
B: Is it? (Standard Br. Eng. = Have they?)
220 Charles Owen
Some teachers never lose the habit of prescription, but the combined
effects of local conditions and conventional linguistic training can be
enough to reduce the most confident of teachers to unhelpful vacillation:
'Well, I wouldn't write that, but I cannot be sure that nobody does. Of
course English is a very variable language. We could try looking it up in
Quirk's Grammar, but even that's not infallible you know', and so forth.
Now though, instead of relying on intuition, or deferring to Quirk et al.
(1972), those with access to a large corpus can check the actual
frequency of a queried phrase, structure, word, etc. Instead of referring
to a book in which usage is mediated via the generalizations of linguists,
teachers can form their own generalizations based on the data before
their eyes. So when the student next asks a question, the teacher can
either summon up a concordance or, better still, and in an ideal world,
let him or her find the answer on a computer terminal. The 'linguist' (i.e.
language learner) becomes a descriptive linguist (cf. Johns 1991). From
this it might seem to follow that the days of intuitive prescription by the
teacher are numberedonly lack of hardware prevents the onward
march of 'the evidence'.
A potential refinement in countries with recently indigenized forms of
English is the parallel corpus, with software capable of drawing to the
user's attention any statistical differences between local and exoglossic
patterns. For example, Tongue (1974: 67), like many others since, notes
that Southeast Asian English seems to use the word 'bring' differently
from British English.
When the speaker is not in the main building, not intending to go there
herself, and wishes the hearer to transport the dictaphone away from
where she is at the moment of speaking, it would not be normal in
Britain to say:
Will you please bring this dictaphone over to the main building for me?
In this context, British speakers would say:
Will you please take this dictaphone over to the main building for me?
In Denmark, one would presumably correct this without using up
valuable computer time. In Southeast Asia, a parallel concordance of
'bring' would show the differences in use, perhaps even offering details
of context, with advice for the learner on how to attack the problemif
indeed it is recognized as such.
Whether it really is a problem is not something that the corpus can
settle. Wide divergence between local and exoglossic corpora on
particular points could well be regarded as a problem by an officialdom
searching for evidence with which to harass local teachers, but it could
equally serve to raise the status of certain local forms which already
enjoy covert prestige. In other words, while teachers might believe that
better prescription will follow from more reliable description, in practice
they would still have to decide which of the two (or more) descriptions
they prefer.
Concordances and language leaching 221
It is important to note that I am not claiming that corpus-based teachers
see arbitration in disputes on correctness as the principal benefit of a
corpus. The notion of 'learner as descriptive linguist' has great merit in
day-to-day consciousness-raising, as Johns (1991) demonstrates. None-
theless, this article is concerned with prescription. If one holds that
accurate description depends on corpus data alone, that prescription
should relate to 'the evidence', and that learners really do need
prescription, then arbitration must logically be a possible use. In the rest
of this paper I consider some implications of trying to use the corpus in
this way.
Consulting the The problems of enhancing prescription with a corpus are by no means
corpus confined to areas where sensitivities over indigenous English are an
issue. Consider Ah Peng, a research student from China, studying at a
British university. Having learned English as a foreign language, he now
wants to publish his work in a European journal, and is aiming at an
internationally acceptable form of written academic English. His latest
piece of work contains the following sentence:
Many more experimental studies require to be done before we can say
that . . .'
The teacher, British, educated in Britain, sure of his mother-tongue
competence, has red-pencilled this and added a couple of notes. First, he
suggests replacing require with need. Second, he says that if Ah Peng
insists on using require then he could try:
Many more experimental studies are required before we can say
t hat . . .
In other words, the verb require does not occur in the pattern attempted
by Ah Peng. It is true that it usually involves the passive, but it is the
verb require itself which is passive, not the infinitive verb phrase which
follows. The alternative of using a participial structure to convey the
passive sense, e.g. These patients require handling with great care, sounds
just about possible, but not very elegant. Just for good measure, the
teacher suggests that Ah Peng look it up in the Collins CO BUILD
English Grammar (1990) and the COBUILD corpus itself, where he will
be sure to find confirmatory evidence.
So Ah Peng does this, and finds that require is indeed found in the
passive, and there are plenty of lines illustrating this, for example:
Parliamentary approval would be required for any scheme
However, he also finds lines like this:
... decided that a large number of laws would require to be passed by a
two-thirds majority
In fact, he finds more than a dozen of these, made all the more
impressive by some nifty software which has extracted them from the
mass and presented them together on one page. Here is another
example:
222 Charles Owen
Yes, your cordon pears do require to be pruned in summer
Ah Peng greets the teacher next week with a triumphant gleam in his eye.
The question here is, how should the teacher respond? Of course, we
could say that he should not have suggested checking the corpus without
first doing so himselfserves him right. But while this may be a sound
strategy for avoiding embarrassment, teachers do not have the time to
do this every time their red pencil twitches. The teacher thought there
was no chance of Ah Peng deriving comfort from the corpus, but he was
wrong. Does that mean that his knowledge of the possibilities of English
is less than it should be? Corpus linguists would tend to answer 'Of
course'. But this does not seem to me to help the teacher, whose
responsibility it still is to advise the learner. What are the options?
Broadly, I think there are three:
1 The teacher expresses apologetic surprise to Ah Peng, and reinstates
his original sentence.
2 He digs his toes in, and says that despite their appearance in the
corpus, these examples are deviant. He may attempt to cite their
statistical rarity in support.
3 He says 'Well, this just confirms what I have been saying all along,
which is that language is unstable. Class-shifting and recategorization
are all part of the normal ebb and flow of any language, and what we
probably have here is a case of the verb require trespassing, as it
were, on the territory of the verb need. It is clear that the semantics
of require and need are similar, and it may be fairly common for low
frequency, register-bound words such as require to expand their
syntactic patterning potential to mirror a semantically similar high-
frequency word. But such expansion may be context-determined,
and in any case will not necessarily be regarded as correct English by
educated native-speakers, even though the expansion has been
perpetrated by them in the first place.'
Option 1, the 'anything for a quiet life' choice, does not seem to me to be
adequate. Linguists whose judgements I respect have nearly all found
Ah Peng's sentence unacceptable, or at best inelegant. To put it in
Aarts' (1991) terms, the example lacks 'normalcy', and we are not
helping Ah Peng if we say nothing. Option 2 seems to treat the corpus as
a suspect source, and might undermine the further use of it by the
student. How would he know when it was relevant and when not? For
me this is not a problem, because I do not believe that a corpus is in
some sense 'real', and thus ultimately authorititative. Indeed, knowing
when a corpus is relevant or not relevant to a point of language is, as I
see it, dependent precisely on the sort of intuition which a good
language teacher ought to have. The researcher's answer to Ah Peng's
challenge is perhaps something along the lines of Option 3, but whether
this is what Ah Peng is looking for from his teacher is debatable. It is, in
effect, a more drawn-out version of the dithery invocation of Quirk et al.
(1972), and is unlikely to interest more than the handful of learners who
take a real interest in lexico-grammar.
Concordances and language leaching 223
Conclusion The question posed by this paper is whether language teachers can
resolve issues of correctness by consulting a corpus. I would answer with
an extremely cautious 'maybe', especially if there was any dogmatic
insistence on the corpus determining prescription. Even the weaker
position, which holds that prescription must be informed by corpus data,
is not necessarily practicable or desirable. While I would agree that
prescription may sometimes be helped by the corpus, this depends
rather a lot on who is consulting it. The example discussed above
suggests that the tension between description and prescription is not
automatically relieved by reference to a corpus. Intuitive prescription is
fundamental to the psychology of language teaching and learning. The
view that prescription is not an entirely reputable activity, but that it can
be legitimized by consulting 'real evidence', is superficially appealing,
but naive. Even if teachers had the time to check every prescription they
want to make, the corpus would not relieve them of the burden of using
their intuition.
Received April 1995
Note
1 I am grateful to Mr Yu Yuguo of the
Department of Foreign Languages, East
China University of Chemical Technology,
Shanghai, for drawing my attention to this
example. Ah Peng is an invented figure for
illustrative purposes only.
References
Aarts, J. 1991. 'Intuition-based and observation-
based grammars' in K. Aijmer and B. Altenberg
(eds.). English Corpus Linguistics. London:
Longman.
Collins COBUILD English Grammar. 1990.
London: Collins.
Crystal, D. 'Neglected grammatical factors in
conversational English' in S. Greenbaum, G.
Leech, and J. Svartvik (eds.). Studies in English
Linguistics for Randolph Quirk. London: Long-
man.
Fromkin, V. and R. Rodman. 1988. An Introduc-
tion to Language (4th edn.). New York: Holt,
Rinehart, and Winston.
Johns, T. 1991. 'Should you be persuadedtwo
samples of data-driven learning'. ELR Journal,
University of Birmingham Centre for English
Language Studies 4:1-16.
Quirk, R., S. Greenbaum, G. Leech, and J.
Svartvik. 1972. A Grammar of Contemporary
English. London: Longman.
Richards, J.C., J. Platt, and H. Weber. 1985.
Longman Dictionary of Applied Linguistics.
Harlow: Longman.
Sinclair, J. M. 1991. Corpus, Concordance,
Collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tongue, R. K. 1974. The English of Singapore and
Malaysia. Singapore: Eastern Universities Press.
The author
Charles Owen is Lecturer in English Language
and Linguistics at the University of Birmingham.
He has an MA in Applied Linguistics from the
University of Reading. He has taught English in
Italy, Spain, Germany, and Singapore, and written
articles on applied linguistics, corpus linguistics
and grammar, as well as guides to the Collins
COBUILD dictionaries.
224 Charles Owen