Vocabulary and English for Specific

Purposes Research Quantitative and

Qualitative Perspectives 1st Edition
Averil Coxhead
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://textbookfull.com/product/vocabulary-and-english-for-specific-purposes-researc
h-quantitative-and-qualitative-perspectives-1st-edition-averil-coxhead/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

English for Specific Purposes Instruction and Research:

Current Practices, Challenges and Innovations Nalan
Kenny

https://textbookfull.com/product/english-for-specific-purposes-
instruction-and-research-current-practices-challenges-and-
innovations-nalan-kenny/

Introducing English for Specific Purposes 1st Edition

Laurence Anthony

https://textbookfull.com/product/introducing-english-for-
specific-purposes-1st-edition-laurence-anthony/

Integrating Information and Communication Technologies

in English for Specific Purposes 1st Edition Rosa
Muñoz-Luna

https://textbookfull.com/product/integrating-information-and-
communication-technologies-in-english-for-specific-purposes-1st-
edition-rosa-munoz-luna/

Educational research planning conducting and evaluating

quantitative and qualitative research fourth edition
Creswell

https://textbookfull.com/product/educational-research-planning-
conducting-and-evaluating-quantitative-and-qualitative-research-
fourth-edition-creswell/
Academic English for Computer Science An English for
Specific and Academic Purposes Course for International
students of Computer Science Computer Engineering
Information and Communication Systems Rizopoulou
https://textbookfull.com/product/academic-english-for-computer-
science-an-english-for-specific-and-academic-purposes-course-for-
international-students-of-computer-science-computer-engineering-
information-and-communication-systems-riz/

Social Research Methods Qualitative Quantitative and

Mixed Methods Approaches 1st Edition Sigmund Grønmo

https://textbookfull.com/product/social-research-methods-
qualitative-quantitative-and-mixed-methods-approaches-1st-
edition-sigmund-gronmo/

Empirical Political Analysis Quantitative and

Qualitative Research Methods Richard C. Rich

https://textbookfull.com/product/empirical-political-analysis-
quantitative-and-qualitative-research-methods-richard-c-rich/

Chinese for Specific and Professional Purposes Theory

Pedagogical Applications and Practices Hongyin Tao

https://textbookfull.com/product/chinese-for-specific-and-
professional-purposes-theory-pedagogical-applications-and-
practices-hongyin-tao/

Qualitative Research Methods in English Medium

Instruction for Emerging Researchers Theory and Case
Studies of Contemporary Research 1st Edition Curle

https://textbookfull.com/product/qualitative-research-methods-in-
english-medium-instruction-for-emerging-researchers-theory-and-
case-studies-of-contemporary-research-1st-edition-curle/
Vocabulary and English for Specific
Purposes Research

Vocabulary and English for Specific Purposes provides an

Research
important contribution to the study of vocabulary and its relationship to
ESP research and teaching.
Presenting Coxhead’s original research plus a comprehensive review of
research in this field, this volume advances understanding of the theoretical
and methodological research in this area, and relates the findings to ESP
teaching. Key features include the following:

an outline of the nature and role of vocabulary in ESP from both

quantitative and qualitative approaches;
analysis of context in vocabulary research in four key areas; and
a review of the application of vocabulary research to professional
and pedagogical practice.

Written by a leading researcher, Vocabulary and ESP Research provides key

reading for those working in this area.

Averil Coxhead is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Linguistics and

Applied Language Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.
Routledge Research in English for Specific Purposes
Series editors: Brian Paltridge and Sue Starfield

Routledge Research in English for Specific Purposes is a series of monograph

studies showcasing cutting-edge research in the field of English for Specific
Purposes. Books in this series provide theoretically innovative and
empirically rigorous examples of research that advance understanding of
topics within ESP, each providing a comprehensive background, a survey of
modern research and avenues for future exploration in the area.

Brian Paltridge is Professor of TESOL at the University of Sydney. He has

taught English as a second language in Australia, New Zealand and Italy
and has published extensively in the areas of academic writing, discourse
analysis and research methods. He is editor emeritus for the journal English
for Specific Purposes and co-edited the Handbook of English for Specific
Purposes (Wiley, 2013).

Sue Starfield is a Professor in the School of Education and Director of The

Learning Centre at the University of New South Wales. Her research and
publications include tertiary academic literacies, doctoral writing, writing
for publication, identity in academic writing and ethnographic research
methods. She is a former editor of the journal English for Specific Purposes
and coeditor of the Handbook of English for Specific Purposes (Wiley, 2013).

www.routledge.com/Routledge-Research-in-English-for-Specific-
Purposes/book-series/RRESP
Titles in this series

Aviation English
Dominique Estival, Candace Farris and Brett Molesworth

Vocabulary and English for Specific Purposes Research

Quantitative and Qualitative Perspectives
Averil Coxhead
Vocabulary and English for Specific
Purposes Research

Quantitative and Qualitative Perspectives

Averil Coxhead
First published 2018
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2018 Averil Coxhead

The right of Averil Coxhead to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her
in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,

and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this title has been requested

ISBN: 978-1-138-96313-9 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-14647-8 (ebk)

Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents

List of figures
List of tables
Acknowledgements

1 Introduction

2 Approaches to identifying specialised vocabulary for ESP

3 The role and value of word list research for ESP

4 Multi-word units and metaphor in ESP

5 Specialised vocabulary in secondary school/Middle School

6 Pre-university, undergraduate and postgraduate vocabulary

7 Specialised vocabulary research and the professions

8 Vocabulary in the trades

9 Vocabulary research and ESP: curriculum, classroom tasks and materials

design and testing

10 Future directions and conclusion

Appendix 1
Appendix 2
References
Index
Figures

3.1 Examples of the target word stress in an Electrical Engineering corpus

and the BNC spoken corpus using Lex Tutor
3.2 An example of a shell noun mechanism
4.1 Examples from an academic corpus of the consequences of as a frame
4.2 Three patterns of use for on the basis of
5.1 An example of grammar integrated into a Literature class in an
international school
5.2 Example from an EAL lesson in an international school
5.3 A section of teacher talk in the German International School grade 6
Mathematics corpus
5.4 Mini solar system text from Hook (2005) with marked GSL, AWL,
Science list and words not found in any list
5.5 Two extracts on distillation from an international school Science class,
year 6
5.6 Example of a text on taxation from a social enquiry unit at level 5 on tax
education and citizenship
5.7 The top ten words in the Middle School Social Studies and History
Vocabulary List
6.1 A sample of the Applied Linguistics text showing the various kinds of
words
8.1 Connor, a Carpentry tutor, on specialised vocabulary in the trades
8.2 A section from Unit Standard 13036, carry out safe working practices on
construction sites
8.3 A sample of text on diesel from a textbook in Automotive Engineering
8.4 Example from a building site interaction in the Carpentry corpus
8.5 Example of specialised trades vocabulary in context: professional writing
in Carpentry
8.6 An example of a Builders’ Diary by a student
8.7 ‘Screw’ as a technical and non-technical vocabulary item in a student’s
Builders’ Diaries
8.8 Interview conversation about vocabulary and the Builders’
8.9 A sample of text on diesel from a textbook in Automotive Engineering
9.1 An example of a vocabulary-related episode from Basturkmen and
Shackelford
10.1 Examples of teacher talk from university lectures
Tables

2.1 Quero’s (2015) top ten medical words in a Medical and a general English
corpus
2.2 Meanings and distribution of consist, credit and abstract across Science,
Engineering and Social Sciences
2.3 Steps in the Chung and Nation scale for Anatomy vocabulary
2.4 Levels, methods and examples from Chujo and Utiyama
3.1 The top 20 lemmas in the AVL
3.2 Fourteen subject areas of the written Science corpus
3.3 Some examples of potential specialised vocabulary from a written
Carpentry corpus
3.4 Initial analysis of coverage of Nation’s BNC/COCA frequency lists over a
Carpentry corpus
3.5 The most frequent proper nouns in TED Talks six-by-six corpus
3.6 Commonly used specialised items selected by a Carpentry tutor
3.7 Acronyms, abbreviations and Latinate forms from the written academic
corpus used for the AWL
3.8 Coverage of the GSL/AWL/Science-specific lists over the four secondary
Science textbooks
4.1 Top 20 key academic collocations and their mean frequencies from
Durrant
4.2 Collocations to the left and right of analysis
5.1 The first 12 most frequent items in the first three BNC/COCA lists from
Delta Mathematics
5.2 Examples of mathematical collocations and multi-word units in Barton
and Cox
5.3 The ten most frequent word families in the Middle School Vocabulary
List
5.4 Categorisations and examples of Science-specific vocabulary from
Ardasheva and Tretter adapted from Miller
6.1 Coverage of the AWL over a range of academic corpora by frequency
6.2 Examples of the distribution of meanings of consist, credit and abstract
across three disciplines (%)
6.3 Most frequent academic word families in the sections of the AgroCorpus
6.4 Examples of general, semi-technical and technical vocabulary in
Computer Science from Lam
6.5 Most frequent technical items and meanings in Computer Science from
West’s second 1,000 words of the GSL
6.6 Examples from Watson-Todd’s opacity-ranked Engineering word list
7.1 Examples of specialised vocabulary from Breeze
7.2 Ten examples from Nelson’s keyword categorisations of Business nouns
7.3 Top 20 Business Service list words
7.4 Examples from Wette and Hawken of a written formal and informal
medical terminology test
8.1 The written corpus of the LATTE project
8.2 Examples of high frequency specialised vocabulary in Plumbing,
Fabrication and Carpentry
8.3 Questionnaire responses on specialised vocabulary of Carpentry
8.4 Examples of frequent Carpentry words in the Builders’ Diaries up to
6,000 of Nation’ BNC lists and beyond
8.5 Warm-up items for the tutor task
8.6 The first 26 words of the Automotive Engineering (AE) list and all of
sublist 13
8.7 Thirty common abbreviations in Fabrication and their meanings
8.8 First 25 Fabrication words by frequency and by alphabet
Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my colleagues and postgraduate students in the School

of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, Victoria University of
Wellington, for their advice and feedback on ideas and drafts. Thank you
also to all the teacher and student participants and research assistants who
have taken part in research that forms a significant portion of this book.
Chapter 1
Introduction

Introduction
This book is about vocabulary research in English for Specific Purposes
(ESP) – that is, technical or specialised vocabulary. The book is meant for
established and new researchers, and interested teachers in ESP and
vocabulary studies. The aim of the book is to broadly pull together
vocabulary research into ESP in one volume, drawing on the strengths of
research in vocabulary studies over recent years. ESP is an umbrella term for
many areas of specialisation, including English for Academic Purposes
(EAP), Professional and Occupational English and English in the Trades. The
volume aims to use these discussions as a way to help build our
understandings of vocabulary through the lens of ESP. That said, this is not a
book about vocabulary acquisition, per se.
ESP vocabulary research includes a broad base of quantitative research,
mostly drawing on large-scale, corpus-based analyses of written and some
spoken texts in ESP, and a less well-established, but no less important, focus
on qualitative research. Qualitative studies can shed light on specialised
vocabulary in ways which corpora alone cannot. As Durrant (2014, p. 354)
writes, corpus-based studies cannot tell us ‘How students interact with the
texts or what they need to be able to know about or do with words to
complete their tasks successfully’.
Technical vocabulary is known by a large number of different terms in the
field (see Nation, 2013), including semi-technical and specialised vocabulary.
A well-known distinction is Beck, McKeown and Kucan’s (2013) three-tier
model: basic vocabulary (Tier One), high frequency/utility words that are
cross-curricular (Tier Two) and low frequency, domain-/area-specific lexis
(Tier Three). This book is concerned mostly with Tier Two and Tier Three
vocabulary. I use the term specialised vocabulary.
This volume approaches vocabulary research for ESP by looking first at
ways to identify this lexis, word list research in the field and multi-word
units. The next section focuses on ESP vocabulary in four contexts:
secondary school, university, professional and occupational contexts and
trades-based education. The final section is on ESP vocabulary research in
language curricula, materials design and testing. The book also aims to
identify gaps in these fields and suggest possible research to help fill them.

Why is vocabulary important in ESP?

There are many reasons why vocabulary is important in ESP, and each
chapter in this book begins with reasons for investigating this field. Overall,
there are several main reasons common to all these areas. The first reason is
closely related to a feature of specialised vocabulary in ESP, which is its
limited range of use (Nation, 2013). Defining this lexis can be difficult
because we need to decide whether only words which are closely related to
the subject are specialised or only those that are unique to the subject area
are specialised. If we take the first approach, then the definition is much
wider and inclusive. If we take the second approach, then the definition is
much narrower and exclusive. For this reason, estimating the size of a
technical vocabulary is difficult, because a great deal depends on which
approach is taken. Estimates of how much technical vocabulary might be in
a text can range from 20% to 30% of a text (Chung & Nation, 2003). If up to
one word in three in a line of discipline-specific text could be technical in
nature, then the sheer amount and frequency of discipline-specific lexical
items in specialised texts is a powerful reason why this vocabulary is
important.
Nation (2013) points out that Medicine and Botany are fields with large
technical vocabularies. Second and foreign language learners need a large
vocabulary to cope with their studies in academic or professional
environments. Evans and Morrison (2011, p. 203), in a paper on the first-year
experience in English-medium higher education in Hong Kong, found a lack
of technical vocabulary to be a major source of difficulty for students. In
research into vocabulary in trades education, students report the same
problem (Coxhead, Demecheleer & McLaughlin, 2016). Vocabulary research
in EAP can help identify the single words and multi-word units these
learners need. It can also find out more about the vocabulary these learners
use in their writing – for example, Hyland and Tse (2007) and Durrant (2014,
p. 353) found that vocabulary use differs across disciplines. To use Durant’s
examples, philosophy students use specialised adjectives such as ontological,
engineers use specialised nouns and Science students use specialised verbs.
Another reason why specialised vocabulary is important is that
knowledge of the vocabulary of a field is tightly related to content
knowledge of the discipline (Woodward-Kron, 2008). In a longitudinal study
of undergraduate students’ academic writing in Education, she writes,

The specialist language of a discipline is intrinsic to students’ learning of disciplinary

knowledge; students need to show their understanding of concepts, phenomena,
relations between phenomena etc. by incorporating the specialist language and
terminology of their discipline into their writing accurately. They also need to adopt the
specialist language in order to make meaning and engage with disciplinary knowledge.
(Woodward-Kron, 2008, p. 246)

This engagement with disciplinary knowledge and vocabulary is important

also because it signals belonging to a community which shares the same
concepts and understandings of a field (Ivanič, 1998; Wray, 2002).
Technical vocabulary in a field may or may not be shared with other
technical areas, and learners do not tend to meet this specialised or technical
vocabulary outside the discipline of their studies. Medical vocabulary, for
example, is typically not included in everyday conversations in English.
Plumbing vocabulary tends not to be well known outside the field but can
become particularly important in the event of a burst pipe or worse. That
said, we all need, at some point, to communicate with plumbers and medical
professionals, and it is important that these specialists also know how to
help non-specialists understand what they are saying. Vocabulary research
can help these endeavours also.

Why am I interested in specialised

vocabulary?
My interest in this field developed firstly through teaching in language
schools in various countries, such as Romania, Hungary and Estonia. The
students in these schools were predominantly adult learners, and many had
quite low levels of proficiency in English. Many of these students were
professionals, for example, heart surgeons, agricultural scientists, teachers
and business people, and their language needs did not seem to be well
served by the general English textbooks which made up the curricula in the
schools. These textbooks and materials had other important functions for the
students, such as helpful ways to meet and talk about general topics, and
support for language skills development. At a teacher’s conference in
Estonia, Larry Selinker, professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of
Michigan, gave a talk where he emphasised the importance of empirical
research to support learning and teaching. This talk served as a turning point
as I began to wonder what sort of empirical research I needed to know about
for my teaching, and what assumptions I was making as a teacher.
During my postgraduate studies back in Aotearoa/New Zealand, I began
to teach EAP. It was during this time that I became more aware of research
in vocabulary studies and how it could inform and, in some cases, transform
the learning and teaching objectives of a class. I consulted Jim Dickie at
Victoria University, a wise lecturer in my postgraduate studies about doing a
thesis as part of my master’s study. Jim said, ‘You know what works, but you
don’t know why.’ This was another turning point. And then John Read, also
then at Victoria University, mentioned that Xue and Nation’s (1984)
University Word List needed updating. So I went to talk to Paul Nation. This
is how the Academic Word List (AWL) (Coxhead, 2000) research began. I
have been lucky enough to be able to have opportunities to talk about
research with these and other great colleagues in Aotearoa/New Zealand
and in far-flung places many times over the last 20 years.
How is this book organised?
The book is organised into three main parts. The first part contains the first
three chapters, and they focus on different aspects of research into
vocabulary in ESP. Chapter 2 looks at approaches to identifying vocabulary
in ESP, from corpus-based approaches with quantitative measures through
to qualitative approaches, including, for example, using a scale, consulting
experts and consulting a corpus for evidence of language in use. Chapter 2
looks into specialised word lists, which is a fast-moving and fairly large area
of research. There seem to be more word lists for ESP than ever before. This
chapter looks first of all into developing and validating word lists and then
moves into showing how word lists have been used to find out more about
the nature of specialised texts, particularly in EAP and for finding out about
how many words learners need to deal with the vocabulary of these texts
(Nation, 2006). Chapter 4 focuses on multi-word units and metaphor,
particularly in EAP, because this is where much of the research is to be
found. The multi-word unit section of the chapter draws on research into
general and specific collocations for EAP, lexical bundles and academic
formulas, and on disciplinary perspectives (for example, work by Hyland,
2008; Biber, 2006; Simpson-Vlach & Ellis, 2010; Liu, 2012, to name a few).
Part Two is about vocabulary in a range of contexts, beginning with
secondary and Middle School lexis (Greene & Coxhead, 2015) in Chapter 4.
Four main subject areas form the main part of this chapter: English
Literature, Mathematics, Science and Social Sciences, with examples from
written and spoken corpora. Chapter 6 focuses on pre-university, university
and postgraduate vocabulary research, which are areas of major activity in
EAP. Case studies from a range of subject areas are included, such as
Sciences, Agriculture, Engineering, Medicine and Computer Science.
Chapter 7 is based on vocabulary in English for Professional and
Occupational Purposes, drawing on research into a variety of areas such as
Aviation, Legal English and Business and Finance, and occupational
vocabulary in Medical Communication and Nursing. The final chapter in
this group is on vocabulary in the trades, based on a major research project
between Victoria University of Wellington and the Wellington Institute of
Technology. The project investigates discourse and lexical elements of four
trades: Carpentry, Plumbing, Automotive Engineering and Fabrication. The
vocabulary part of the research into each of these trades is discussed in turn
and used to illustrate key aspects of vocabulary for specific purposes.
The last part of the book contains two chapters. Chapter 9 is about
vocabulary in ESP in relation to teaching, learning and testing. The chapter
begins with two overarching frameworks in vocabulary studies: Nation’s
(2007) Four Strands and Laufer and Hulstijn’s (2001) Involvement Load
Hypothesis, and their relationship to specialised vocabulary in learning and
teaching. The chapter also includes a section on using word list research in
course design and materials. The final part of the chapter looks at testing in
ESP vocabulary research.
Chapters 2 to 9 end with a section on limitations of research in these
areas. These limitations are picked up in Chapter 10, where five main areas
of needed research are discussed: more qualitative research, testing English
vocabulary for specialised purposes, theorising in vocabulary studies
(Schmitt, 2010), evaluations of specialised vocabulary research when it is
incorporated into courses of study and materials design and the need for
replication and, finally, widening the areas of research to include more
analysis of spoken language, different contexts of research and multi-word
units.
Chapter 2
Approaches to identifying specialised
vocabulary for ESP

Introduction
The focus of this chapter is approaches in research to identifying specialised
vocabulary for ESP. The chapter begins with considering why this is an
important aspect of lexical research in ESP, before moving on to corpus-
based quantitative approaches to identifying vocabulary for ESP. Qualitative
approaches follow, including analysing concordances from corpora,
consulting experts, using a scale, using a technical dictionary, surveys,
questionnaires, glossaries and case study analyses of teachers and learner
decision making including analysing student texts for annotations. The
chapter ends with a brief discussion of how a reader might carry out a
research project in this area.

Why is identifying specialised vocabulary

important for ESP?
Identifying and categorising academic and disciplinary vocabulary for ESP
is important for a range of researchers, learners, teachers and dictionary and
materials designers. For researchers, identifying specialised vocabulary in
ESP is important because there are many outstanding questions in this field
of research. For example, one research question which has been approached
in several ways is ‘When does general vocabulary stop and specialised
vocabulary begin?’ (see Hwang & Nation, 1995; Coxhead & Hirsh, 2007 for
examples). Word list developers need to be aware of these technical
meanings of everyday words so that selection principles can be followed as
closely as possible (for more, go to Chapter 3). This research needs to be
based on solid principles of selection, guided by the context for learning and
the proficiency level of the learners. For dictionary and materials designers,
identifying specialised vocabulary is important for deciding what lexical
items are included in resources and what kind of attention they are given. A
good example of the possible impact of a study of specialised vocabulary is
the AWL (Coxhead, 2000, 2016a). This list is widely used in textbook series,
dictionaries and paper-based and online materials design.
For learners and teachers, identifying this vocabulary is vital for setting
goals for learning and for programmes of study, as well as checking a
learner’s progress and helping make tomorrow’s vocabulary learning easier
(see Nation, 2013). Organising vocabulary learning is important for language
learning, so finding out what learners know before they start a course of
study can help determine what their vocabulary needs are. These needs
might be different depending on the amount of background knowledge in
the subject a learner already has and their proficiency in English.
There is quite a range of terminology in the research on specialised
vocabulary. Here are some examples. Some researchers use the term
technical, as in (Chung & Nation, 2003, 2004) who measured the strength of
the relationship between the word and the specialised subject area (for more
on this research, see the following). Semi-technical vocabulary is a term used
by Farrell (1990) to describe words which are not technical (specific to a
discipline) or non-technical (everyday). Fraser (2007, 2009) uses the term
cryptotechnical in Pharmacology rather than semi-technical (see Chapter 6).
More recently, Watson-Todd (2017) has used the term opaque vocabulary,
which means words that learners might struggle with in their learning
because the general meaning is not the same as the technical meaning (see
Chapter 6 for more on this study in Engineering). In this book, specialised
vocabulary is used as an umbrella term for vocabulary which relates in some
way to its particular discipline, whether the word is high, mid or low
frequency (Nation, 2016).

Quantitative approaches to identifying

vocabulary for ESP
Corpora are commonly used in quantitative studies for identifying
vocabulary for ESP in corpus-based research. A corpus is a body of texts of
written or spoken language, and, increasingly, a corpus can be multi-media.
An early example of multi-media in EAP is Hilary Nesi’s Essential
Academic Skills in English (EASE) series (see Nesi, 2001). Corpus-based
studies allow for larger-scale investigations of words in context than early
studies of page-by-page analysis by hand. A key feature of corpus analysis is
that such studies should be relatively easy to replicate, but only if the
corpora are publicly available. Unfortunately, many corpora are not made
available for further analysis, but some corpora have been made publicly
available, such as the British Academic Written English Corpus (BAWE) and
the British Academic Spoken English Corpus (BASE) (both available at
sketchengine.co.uk) and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University Corpora of
Professional English (available at the website for the Research Centre for
Professional Communication in English: rcpce.engl.polyu.edu.hk).
In specialised vocabulary research, a corpus of a particular field could
contain a range of texts. For example, in Nelson’s (n.d.) work on business-
specific vocabulary, four corpora were used: the written texts of business
people, texts which they read, their spoken texts and texts which they
listened to. This organisation of the corpus illustrates Nelson’s concern that a
corpus represents, as much as possible, the kinds of documents or texts of
that field. Corpus studies have contributed a great deal to our quest to
identify and understand more about specialised vocabulary. They have been
particularly useful for developing word lists for use in language classrooms
and for independent study. Cheng’s (2012) volume on corpus linguistics
contains clear step-by-step instructions on extracting lexis from a corpus, for
example, to generate a word list and research single words, as well as ways
to identify multi-word units in corpora through n-gram analysis (see Cheng,
2012, for example).
The following are some ways that researchers have investigated corpora
to identify specialised vocabulary in ESP.

Corpus comparison
A fairly quick way of finding technical vocabulary is using a corpus-
comparison approach which involves, obviously, two corpora. One is a
specialised corpus and the other is a general-purpose corpus. First of all,
items which only occur in the technical or specialised corpus are labelled
‘technical’ whereas those in the general corpus are labelled ‘not technical’.
For any comparison like this, there will be clear examples of lexical items
which will occur only in the specialised corpus and not in the general
corpus. For example, comparing a Carpentry corpus with a fiction corpus,
words such as insulation and cladding only occur in the Carpentry corpus
(Coxhead, Demecheleer, & McLaughlin, 2016). The second step is to look at
shared items between both corpora. Each word is compared using a ratio
depending on its frequency in either corpus. For example, Chung (2003)
decided on a ratio of 50 occurrences in the specialised corpus to one
occurrence in the general corpus and found that with this ratio, lexical items
that were 50 times more frequent in the specialised corpus had more than a
90% chance of being technical vocabulary. Chung and Nation (2003)
compared the corpus-comparison approach with several other methods of
identifying technical vocabulary, including technical dictionaries and using a
scale (see the following). They found corpus comparison to be the most
practical and effective method option for identifying technical vocabulary.
Gardner and Davies (2014) used corpus comparison for their Academic
Vocabulary List (AVL), based on the 120-million-word academic subsection
of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) corpus. This
subsection of the corpus contains journal articles, newspapers and
magazines, with journal articles constituting around two thirds of the sub-
corpus. The sub-corpus is divided into 11 disciplines: Business and Finance,
Education, Humanities, History, Law and Political Science, Medicine and
Health, Philosophy, Religion, Psychology, Science and Technology and Social
Science. The smallest section contains 8,030,324 running words and the
largest contains 22,777,656 running words. The AVL is explored in more
detail in Chapter 3.

Table 2.1 Quero’s (2015) top ten medical words in a Medical and a general English corpus

Medcorpus Gencorpus Medcorpus/Gencorpus

Rank Word type
frequency frequency ratio

1 vascular 2,463 2 1,231.50

2 viral 2,240 2 1,120
3 lesions 4,795 5 959
4 lesion 1,653 2 826.50
5 meningitis 1,528 2 764
6 DNA 1,952 3 650.67
7 gastrointestinal 1,853 3 617.67
8 ventricular 2,415 4 603.75
9 atrial 1,182 2 591
10 CT 1,743 3 581
 Table 2.1 shows the ten most frequent items and their relative frequencies
from a comparative analysis of a Medical textbook corpus and a general
English corpus from Quero’s (2015) study of Medical vocabulary in
textbooks for university study. Note how much more specialised and
frequently occurring words such as vascular and viral are in the Medical
corpus relative to the general corpus.
Abbreviations such as DNA are included in the table because these lexical
items are particularly prevalent in Medical texts.

Keyword analysis
Like corpus comparison, keywords are determined by looking at their
frequency in several corpora and using a statistical formula for comparing
them with a norm. One way to do this is to compare the frequency of words
in one specialised field against a general corpus. The concept of keyness is
linked to the probability of a word occurring in a text. If a word has a high
level of keyness, the occurrence is probably not by chance. The Lancaster
University Corpus Linguistics website has a good example of the concept of
keyness (go to www.lancaster.ac.uk/fss/courses/ling/corpus/blue/l03_2.htm)
using an analysis of Baptist Church newsletters and a general corpus.
Paquot’s (2010) Academic Keyword List (AKL) was developed using
keyness, range and distribution of vocabulary in two academic written
corpora (professional writing and student writing by native speakers of
English). The study included single and multi-word items, and incorporated
high frequency lexis. Examples from the AKL include same, second, which,
scope, requirement, leading, late, according, according to and relation to. The
full AKL is available at www.uclouvain.be/en-372126.html. Gilquin, Granger
and Paquot (2007) point out the potential of learner corpora for comparative
studies between writers in English with different first languages, for
example, at different levels of proficiency, and with first language corpora
(see Flowerdew, 2014 for more examples of studies using keyword analysis
in ESP).
A second way to use keyword analysis in specialised texts is exemplified
in a study by Grabowski (2015), who wanted to find keywords in a corpus of
pharmaceutical English which had four kinds of texts from the field: patient
information leaflets, summaries of product characteristics, clinical trial
procedures and chapters from academic textbooks. He did not use a general
corpus, being instead interested in the keyness of lexical items in the four
different kinds of texts in pharmacology – in other words, how each of these
different text types is different from or the same as the others. To help with
the comparison, Grabowski (2015) decided on a minimum number of
occurrences for a word and used the statistical measure of log likelihood – a
measure for comparing word frequency in corpora and whether lexical
items occur more often in one section of a corpus than another (see
McEnery, Xiao & Tono, 2006) to determine the probability of whether an
occurrence of a word is by chance. Through this analysis, Grabowski was
able to rank the four kinds of texts according to the number of keywords in
them. The academic textbooks contained the highest number of keywords
and the information leaflets for patients contained the least. Grabowski
(2015) then provides examples of keywords linked to the communicative
purpose of the texts in the corpus. Kwary (2011) points out that keyword
analyses do not take multi-word units into account, stating that this is a
drawback of such studies.

Issues and critiques of corpus design

A major issue in corpus studies is determining the size of the corpus. A
corpus needs to be large enough to ensure that sufficient samples of
specialised vocabulary occur for analysis or selection in word lists, for
example (see Nation & Sorrell, 2016). For high frequency words, corpora
need not be very large, because the words occur often. Similarly, words
which are closely related to a specialised field will also tend to occur quite
frequently. In Plumbing, for example, a very frequently used word in
written texts is pipe. Lower frequency words are more problematic, because
they do not occur as often. Specialised corpora for ESP can help narrow
down the analysis of texts and focus on specialised vocabulary in particular
(see Krisnamurthy & Kosem, 2007; Ghadessy, Henry & Roseberry, 2001).
Representativeness of the corpus is an important issue in corpus-based
research, and it has a number of elements. One question for
representativeness is whether the corpus represents the kind of writing,
reading or multi-media ‘text’ which ESP students would be exposed to. For
example, Gardner and Davies (2016) take issue with Durrant’s (2016) study
of the AVL in university student writing in the BAWE corpus, which
suggests that university undergraduate student writing is representative of
writing in the disciplines because there are many other kinds of texts which
also represent academic writing in the disciplines. This is not to say that
investigating student writing is not a valid research activity, but that larger
claims need to be based on wider and more representative samples of
language. Paquot (2010) focuses on keywords in student writing, arguing
that learner corpora shed a different light on academic vocabulary than
analyses based on corpora of professional academic writers.
Another example of representativeness can be found in the Language in
the Trades (LATTE) project (see Chapter 8). The spoken corpus in this study
includes both classroom and on-site recordings in the case of Carpentry. This
corpus focuses on teacher talk, mostly for practical reasons: building sites
are noisy places, multiple microphones would be needed across areas as big
as a building site for a house and over 30 microphones would be needed to
capture the language use of one whole class out of a possible cohort of 120
students. For Automotive Engineering, recordings include classroom
sessions where the talk changes from more engineering-oriented classroom
talk about vehicles to a broader and more general chat about cars (see
Parkinson & MacKay, 2016 for more on talk in the trades). Decisions need to
be made about the purpose of the research and how it impacts the corpus
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 “We know a great deal about a good many things,” said Mrs.
Maplebury.
“What is it, Bradbury?” said Mrs. Fisher.
“I’m afraid I shall have to leave you for a couple of days. Great
nuisance, but there it is. But, of course, I must be there.”
“Where?”
“Ah, where?” said Mrs. Maplebury.
“At Sing-Sing. I see in the paper that to-morrow and the day after
they are inaugurating the new Osborne Stadium. All the men of my
class will be attending, and I must go, too.”
“Must you really?”
“I certainly must. Not to do so would be to show a lack of college
spirit. The boys are playing Yale, and there is to be a big dinner
afterwards. I shouldn’t wonder if I had to make a speech. But don’t
worry, honey,” he said, kissing his wife affectionately. “I shall be back
before you know I’ve gone.” He turned sharply to Mrs. Maplebury. “I
beg your pardon?” he said, stiffly.
“I did not speak.”
“I thought you did.”
“I merely inhaled. I simply drew in air through my nostrils. If I am
not at liberty to draw in air through my nostrils in your house, pray
inform me.”
“I would prefer that you didn’t,” said Bradbury, between set teeth.
“Then I would suffocate.”
“Yes,” said Bradbury Fisher.

Of all the tainted millionaires who, after years of plundering the

widow and the orphan, have devoted the evening of their life to the
game of golf, few can ever have been so boisterously exhilarated as
was Bradbury Fisher when, two nights later, he returned to his home.
His dreams had all come true. He had won his way to the foot of the
rain-bow. In other words, he was the possessor of a small pewter
cup, value three dollars, which he had won by beating a feeble old
gentleman with one eye in the final match of the competition for the
sixth sixteen at the Squashy Hollow Golf Club Invitation Tournament.
He entered the house, radiant.
“Tra-la!” sang Bradbury Fisher. “Tra-la!”
“I beg your pardon, sir?” said Vosper, who had encountered him in
the hall.
“Eh? Oh, nothing. Just tra-la.”
“Very good, sir.”
Bradbury Fisher looked at Vosper. For the first time it seemed to
sweep over him like a wave that Vosper was an uncommonly good
fellow. The past was forgotten, and he beamed upon Vosper like the
rising sun.
“Vosper,” he said, “what wages are you getting?”
“I regret to say, sir,” replied the butler, “that, at the moment, the
precise amount of the salary of which I am in receipt has slipped my
mind. I could refresh my memory by consulting my books, if you so
desire it, sir.”
“Never mind. Whatever it is, it’s doubled.”
“I am obliged, sir. You will, no doubt, send me a written memo, to
that effect?”
“Twenty, if you like.”
“One will be ample, sir.”
Bradbury curveted past him through the baronial hall and into the
Crystal Boudoir. His wife was there alone.
“Mother has gone to bed,” she said. “She has a bad headache.”
 “You don’t say!” said Bradbury. It was as if everything was
conspiring to make this a day of days. “Well, it’s great to be back in
the old home.”
“Did you have a good time?”
“Capital.”
“You saw all your old friends?”
“Every one of them.”
“Did you make a speech at the dinner?”
“Did I! They rolled out of their seats and the waiters swept them up
with dusters.”
“A very big dinner, I suppose?”
“Enormous.”
“How was the football game?”
“Best I’ve ever seen. We won. Number 432,986 made a hundred-
and-ten-yard run for a touch-down in the last five minutes.”
“Really?”
“And that takes a bit of doing, with a ball and chain round your
ankle, believe me!”
“Bradbury,” said Mrs. Fisher, “where have you been these last two
days?”
Bradbury’s heart missed a beat. His wife was looking exactly like
her mother. It was the first time he had ever been able to believe that
she could be Mrs. Maplebury’s daughter.
“Been? Why, I’m telling you.”
“Bradbury,” said Mrs. Fisher, “just one word. Have you seen the
paper this morning?”
“Why, no. What with all the excitement of meeting the boys and
this and that—”
 “Then you have not seen that the inauguration of the new Stadium
at Sing-Sing was postponed on account of an outbreak of mumps in
the prison?”
Bradbury gulped.
“There was no dinner, no football game, no gathering of Old Grads
—nothing! So—where have you been, Bradbury?”
Bradbury gulped again.
“You’re sure you haven’t got this wrong?” he said at length.
“Quite.”
“I mean, sure it wasn’t some other place?”
“Quite.”
“Sing-Sing? You got the name correctly?”
“Quite. Where, Bradbury, have you been these last two days?”
“Well—er—”
Mrs. Fisher coughed dryly.
“I merely ask out of curiosity. The facts will, of course, come out in
court.”
“In court!”
“Naturally I propose to place this affair in the hands of my lawyer
immediately.”
Bradbury started convulsively.
“You mustn’t!”
“I certainly shall.”
A shudder shook Bradbury from head to foot. He felt worse than
he had done when his opponent in the final had laid him a stymie on
the last green, thereby squaring the match and taking it to the
nineteenth hole.
“I will tell you all,” he muttered.
 “Well?”
“Well—it was like this.”
“Yes?”
“Er—like this. In fact, this way.”
“Proceed.”
Bradbury clenched his hands; and, as far as that could be
managed, avoided her eye.
“I’ve been playing golf,” he said in a low, toneless voice.
“Playing golf?”
“Yes.” Bradbury hesitated. “I don’t mean it in an offensive spirit,
and no doubt most men would have enjoyed themselves thoroughly,
but I—well, I am curiously constituted, angel, and the fact is I simply
couldn’t stand playing with you any longer. The fault, I am sure, was
mine, but—well, there it is. If I had played another round with you,
my darling, I think that I should have begun running about in circles,
biting my best friends. So I thought it all over, and, not wanting to
hurt your feelings by telling you the truth, I stooped to what I might
call a ruse. I said I was going to the office; and, instead of going to
the office, I went off to Squashy Hollow and played there.”
Mrs. Fisher uttered a cry.
“You were there to-day and yesterday?”
In spite of his trying situation, the yeasty exhilaration which had
been upon him when he entered the room returned to Bradbury.
“Was I!” he cried. “You bet your Russian boots I was! Only winning
a cup, that’s all!”
“You won a cup?”
“You bet your diamond tiara I won a cup. Say, listen,” said
Bradbury, diving for a priceless Boule table and wrenching a leg off
it. “Do you know what happened in the semi-final?” He clasped his
fingers over the table-leg in the overlapping grip. “I’m here, see,
about fifteen feet off the green. The other fellow lying dead, and I’m
playing the like. Best I could hope for was a half, you’ll say, eh? Well,
listen. I just walked up to that little white ball, and I gave it a little flick,
and, believe me or believe me not, that little white ball never stopped
running till it plunked into the hole.”
He stopped. He perceived that he had been introducing into the
debate extraneous and irrelevant matter.
“Honey,” he said, fervently, “you musn’t get mad about this.
Maybe, if we try again, it will be all right. Give me another chance.
Let me come out and play a round to-morrow. I think perhaps your
style of play is a thing that wants getting used to. After all, I didn’t like
olives the first time I tried them. Or whisky. Or caviare, for that
matter. Probably if—”
Mrs. Fisher shook her head.
“I shall never play again.”
“Oh, but, listen—”
She looked at him fondly, her eyes dim with happy tears.
“I should have known you better, Bradbury. I suspected you. How
foolish I was.”
“There, there,” said Bradbury.
“It was mother’s fault. She put ideas into my head.”
There was much that Bradbury would have liked to say about her
mother, but he felt that this was not the time.
“And you really forgive me for sneaking off and playing at Squashy
Hollow?”
“Of course.”
“Then why not a little round to-morrow?”
“No, Bradbury, I shall never play again. Vosper says I mustn’t.”
“What!”
“He saw me one morning on the links, and he came to me and told
me—quite nicely and respectfully—that it must not occur again. He
said with the utmost deference that I was making a spectacle of
myself and that this nuisance must now cease. So I gave it up. But
it’s all right. Vosper thinks that gentle massage will cure my
wheezing, so I’m having it every day, and really I do think there’s an
improvement already.”
“Where is Vosper?” said Bradbury, hoarsely.
“You aren’t going to be rude to him, Bradbury? He is so sensitive.”
But Bradbury Fisher had left the room.

“You rang, sir?” said Vosper, entering the Byzantine smoking-room

some few minutes later.
“Yes,” said Bradbury. “Vosper, I am a plain, rugged man and I do
not know all that there is to be known about these things. So do not
be offended if I ask you a question.”
“Not at all, sir.”
“Tell me, Vosper, did the Duke ever shake hands with you?”
“Once only, sir—mistaking me in a dimly-lit hall for a visiting
archbishop.”
“Would it be all right for me to shake hands with you now?”
“If you wish it, sir, certainly.”
“I want to thank you, Vosper. Mrs. Fisher tells me that you have
stopped her playing golf. I think that you have saved my reason,
Vosper.”
“That is extremely gratifying, sir.”
“Your salary is trebled.”
“Thank you very much, sir. And, while we are talking, sir, if I might
—. There is one other little matter I wished to speak of, sir.”
“Shoot, Vosper.”
 “It concerns Mrs. Maplebury, sir.”
“What about her?”
“If I might say so, sir, she would scarcely have done for the Duke.”
A sudden wild thrill shot through Bradbury.
“You mean—?” he stammered.
“I mean, sir, that Mrs. Maplebury must go. I make no criticism of
Mrs. Maplebury, you will understand, sir. I merely say that she would
decidedly not have done for the Duke.”
Bradbury drew in his breath sharply.
“Vosper,” he said, “the more I hear of that Duke of yours, the more
I seem to like him. You really think he would have drawn the line at
Mrs. Maplebury?”
“Very firmly, sir.”
“Splendid fellow! Splendid fellow! She shall go to-morrow, Vosper.”
“Thank you very much, sir.”
“And, Vosper.”
“Sir?”
“Your salary. It is quadrupled.”
“I am greatly obliged, sir.”
“Tra-la, Vosper!”
“Tra-la, sir. Will that be all?”
“That will be all. Tra-la!”
“Tra-la, sir,” said the butler.
 CHAPTER IV
CHESTER FORGETS HIMSELF

The afternoon was warm and heavy. Butterflies loafed languidly in

the sunshine, birds panted in the shady recesses of the trees.
The Oldest Member, snug in his favourite chair, had long since
succumbed to the drowsy influence of the weather. His eyes were
closed, his chin sunk upon his breast. The pipe which he had been
smoking lay beside him on the turf, and ever and anon there
proceeded from him a muffled snore.
Suddenly the stillness was broken. There was a sharp, cracking
sound as of splitting wood. The Oldest Member sat up, blinking. As
soon as his eyes had become accustomed to the glare, he perceived
that a foursome had holed out on the ninth and was disintegrating.
Two of the players were moving with quick, purposeful steps in the
direction of the side door which gave entrance to the bar; a third was
making for the road that led to the village, bearing himself as one in
profound dejection; the fourth came on to the terrace.
“Finished?” said the Oldest Member.
The other stopped, wiping a heated brow. He lowered himself into
the adjoining chair and stretched his legs out.
“Yes. We started at the tenth. Golly, I’m tired. No joke playing in
this weather.”
“How did you come out?”
“We won on the last green. Jimmy Fothergill and I were playing
the vicar and Rupert Blake.”
“What was that sharp, cracking sound I heard?” asked the Oldest
Member.
 “That was the vicar smashing his putter. Poor old chap, he had
rotten luck all the way round, and it didn’t seem to make it any better
for him that he wasn’t able to relieve his feelings in the ordinary way.”
“I suspected some such thing,” said the Oldest Member, “from the
look of his back as he was leaving the green. His walk was the walk
of an overwrought soul.”
His companion did not reply. He was breathing deeply and
regularly.
“It is a moot question,” proceeded the Oldest Member, thoughtfully,
“whether the clergy, considering their peculiar position, should not be
more liberally handicapped at golf than the laymen with whom they
compete. I have made a close study of the game since the days of
the feather ball, and I am firmly convinced that to refrain entirely from
oaths during a round is almost equivalent to giving away three
bisques. There are certain occasions when an oath seems to be so
imperatively demanded that the strain of keeping it in must inevitably
affect the ganglions or nerve-centres in such a manner as to
diminish the steadiness of the swing.”
The man beside him slipped lower down in his chair. His mouth
had opened slightly.
“I am reminded in this connection,” said the Oldest Member, “of
the story of young Chester Meredith, a friend of mine whom you
have not, I think, met. He moved from this neighbourhood shortly
before you came. There was a case where a man’s whole happiness
was very nearly wrecked purely because he tried to curb his instincts
and thwart nature in this very respect. Perhaps you would care to
hear the story?”
A snore proceeded from the next chair.
“Very well, then,” said the Oldest Member, “I will relate it.”
 Chester Meredith (said the Oldest Member) was one of the nicest
young fellows of my acquaintance. We had been friends ever since
he had come to live here as a small boy, and I had watched him with
a fatherly eye through all the more important crises of a young man’s
life. It was I who taught him to drive, and when he had all that trouble
in his twenty-first year with shanking his short approaches, it was to
me that he came for sympathy and advice. It was an odd
coincidence, therefore, that I should have been present when he fell
in love.
I was smoking my evening cigar out here and watching the last
couples finishing their rounds, when Chester came out of the club-
house and sat by me. I could see that the boy was perturbed about
something, and wondered why, for I knew that he had won his
match.
“What,” I inquired, “is on your mind?”
“Oh, nothing,” said Chester. “I was only thinking that there are
some human misfits who ought not be allowed on any decent links.”
“You mean—?”
“The Wrecking Crew,” said Chester, bitterly. “They held us up all
the way round, confound them. Wouldn’t let us through. What can
you do with people who don’t know enough of the etiquette of the
game to understand that a single has right of way over a four-ball
foursome? We had to loaf about for hours on end while they
scratched at the turf like a lot of crimson hens. Eventually all four of
them lost their balls simultaneously at the eleventh and we managed
to get by. I hope they choke.”
I was not altogether surprised at his warmth. The Wrecking Crew
consisted of four retired business men who had taken up the noble
game late in life because their doctors had ordered them air and
exercise. Every club, I suppose, has a cross of this kind to bear, and
it was not often that our members rebelled; but there was
undoubtedly something particularly irritating in the methods of the
Wrecking Crew. They tried so hard that it seemed almost
inconceivable that they should be so slow.
 “They are all respectable men,” I said, “and were, I believe, highly
thought of in their respective businesses. But on the links I admit that
they are a trial.”
“They are the direct lineal descendants of the Gadarene swine,”
said Chester firmly. “Every time they come out I expect to see them
rush down the hill from the first tee and hurl themselves into the lake
at the second. Of all the—”
“Hush!” I said.
Out of the corner of my eye I had seen a girl approaching, and I
was afraid lest Chester in his annoyance might use strong language.
For he was one of those golfers who are apt to express themselves
in moments of emotion with a good deal of generous warmth.
“Eh?” said Chester.
I jerked my head, and he looked round. And, as he did so, there
came into his face an expression which I had seen there only once
before, on the occasion when he won the President’s Cup on the last
green by holing a thirty-yard chip with his mashie. It was a look of
ecstasy and awe. His mouth was open, his eyebrows raised, and he
was breathing heavily through his nose.
“Golly!” I heard him mutter.
The girl passed by. I could not blame Chester for staring at her.
She was a beautiful young thing, with a lissom figure and a perfect
face. Her hair was a deep chestnut, her eyes blue, her nose small
and laid back with about as much loft as a light iron. She
disappeared, and Chester, after nearly dislocating his neck trying to
see her round the corner of the club-house, emitted a deep,
explosive sigh.
“Who is she?” he whispered.
I could tell him that. In one way and another I get to know most
things around this locality.
“She is a Miss Blakeney. Felicia Blakeney. She has come to stay
for a month with the Waterfields. I understand she was at school with
Jane Waterfield. She is twenty-three, has a dog named Joseph,
dances well, and dislikes parsnips. Her father is a distinguished
writer on sociological subjects; her mother is Wilmot Royce, the well-
known novelist, whose last work, Sewers of the Soul, was, you may
recall, jerked before a tribunal by the Purity League. She has a
brother, Crispin Blakeney, an eminent young reviewer and essayist,
who is now in India studying local conditions with a view to a series
of lectures. She only arrived here yesterday, so this is all I have been
able to find out about her as yet.”
Chester’s mouth was still open when I began speaking. By the
time I had finished it was open still wider. The ecstatic look in his
eyes had changed to one of dull despair.
“My God!” he muttered. “If her family is like that, what chance is
there for a rough-neck like me?”
“You admire her?”
“She is the alligator’s Adam’s apple,” said Chester, simply.
I patted his shoulder.
“Have courage, my boy,” I said. “Always remember that the love of
a good man, to whom the pro can give only a couple of strokes in
eighteen holes is not to be despised.”
“Yes, that’s all very well. But this girl is probably one solid mass of
brain. She will look on me as an uneducated wart-hog.”
“Well, I will introduce you, and we will see. She looked a nice girl.”
“You’re a great describer, aren’t you?” said Chester. “A wonderful
flow of language you’ve got, I don’t think! Nice girl! Why, she’s the
only girl in the world. She’s a pearl among women. She’s the most
marvellous, astounding, beautiful, heavenly thing that ever drew
perfumed breath.” He paused, as if his train of thought had been
interrupted by an idea. “Did you say that her brother’s name was
Crispin?”
“I did. Why?”
Chester gave vent to a few manly oaths.
“Doesn’t that just show you how things go in this rotten world?”
 “What do you mean?”
“I was at school with him.”
“Surely that should form a solid basis for friendship?”
“Should it? Should it, by gad? Well, let me tell you that I probably
kicked that blighted worm Crispin Blakeney a matter of seven
hundred and forty-six times in the few years I knew him. He was the
world’s worst. He could have walked straight into the Wrecking Crew
and no questions asked. Wouldn’t it jar you? I have the luck to know
her brother, and it turns out that we couldn’t stand the sight of each
other.”
“Well, there is no need to tell her that.”
“Do you mean—?” He gazed at me wildly. “Do you mean that I
might pretend we were pals?”
“Why not? Seeing that he is in India, he can hardly contradict you.”
“My gosh!” He mused for a moment. I could see that the idea was
beginning to sink in. It was always thus with Chester. You had to give
him time. “By Jove, it mightn’t be a bad scheme at that. I mean, it
would start me off with a rush, like being one up on bogey in the first
two. And there’s nothing like a good start. By gad, I’ll do it.”
“I should.”
“Reminiscences of the dear old days when we were lads together,
and all that sort of thing.”
“Precisely.”
“It isn’t going to be easy, mind you,” said Chester, meditatively. “I’ll
do it because I love her, but nothing else in this world would make
me say a civil word about the blister. Well, then, that’s settled. Get on
with the introduction stuff, will you? I’m in a hurry.”
One of the privileges of age is that it enables a man to thrust his
society on a beautiful girl without causing her to draw herself up and
say “Sir!” It was not difficult for me to make the acquaintance of Miss
Blakeney, and, this done, my first act was to unleash Chester on her.
 “Chester,” I said, summoning him as he loafed with an overdone
carelessness on the horizon, one leg almost inextricably entwined
about the other, “I want you to meet Miss Blakeney. Miss Blakeney,
this is my young friend Chester Meredith. He was at school with your
brother Crispin. You were great friends, were you not?”
“Bosom,” said Chester, after a pause.
“Oh, really?” said the girl. There was a pause. “He is in India now.”
“Yes,” said Chester.
There was another pause.
“Great chap,” said Chester, gruffly.
“Crispin is very popular,” said the girl, “with some people.”
“Always been my best pal,” said Chester.
“Yes?”
I was not altogether satisfied with the way matters were
developing. The girl seemed cold and unfriendly, and I was afraid
that this was due to Chester’s repellent manner. Shyness, especially
when complicated by love at first sight, is apt to have strange effects
on a man, and the way it had taken Chester was to make him
abnormally stiff and dignified. One of the most charming things about
him, as a rule, was his delightful boyish smile. Shyness had caused
him to iron this out of his countenance till no trace of it remained. Not
only did he not smile, he looked like a man who never had smiled
and never would. His mouth was a thin, rigid line. His back was stiff
with what appeared to be contemptuous aversion. He looked down
his nose at Miss Blakeney as if she were less than the dust beneath
his chariot-wheels.
I thought the best thing to do was to leave them alone together to
get acquainted. Perhaps, I thought, it was my presence that was
cramping Chester’s style. I excused myself and receded.
 It was some days before I saw Chester again. He came round to
my cottage one night after dinner and sank into a chair, where he
remained silent for several minutes.
“Well?” I said at last.
“Eh?” said Chester, starting violently.
“Have you been seeing anything of Miss Blakeney lately?”
“You bet I have.”
“And how do you feel about her on further acquaintance?”
“Eh?” said Chester, absently.
“Do you still love her?”
Chester came out of his trance.
“Love her?” he cried, his voice vibrating with emotion. “Of course I
love her. Who wouldn’t love her? I’d be a silly chump not loving her.
Do you know,” the boy went on, a look in his eyes like that of some
young knight seeing the Holy Grail in a vision, “do you know, she is
the only woman I ever met who didn’t overswing. Just a nice, crisp,
snappy, half-slosh, with a good full follow-through. And another thing.
You’ll hardly believe me, but she waggles almost as little as George
Duncan. You know how women waggle as a rule, fiddling about for a
minute and a half like kittens playing with a ball of wool. Well, she
just makes one firm pass with the club and then bing! There is none
like her, none.”
“Then you have been playing golf with her?”
“Nearly every day.”
“How is your game?”
“Rather spotty. I seem to be mistiming them.”
I was concerned.
“I do hope, my dear boy,” I said, earnestly, “that you are taking
care to control your feelings when out on the links with Miss
Blakeney. You know what you are like. I trust you have not been
using the sort of language you generally employ on occasions when
you are not timing them right?”
“Me?” said Chester, horrified. “Who, me? You don’t imagine for a
moment that I would dream of saying a thing that would bring a blush
to her dear cheek, do you? Why, a bishop could have gone round
with me and learned nothing new.”
I was relieved.
“How do you find you manage the dialogue these days?” I asked.
“When I introduced you, you behaved—you will forgive an old friend
for criticising—you behaved a little like a stuffed frog with laryngitis.
Have things got easier in that respect?”
“Oh yes. I’m quite the prattler now. I talk about her brother mostly. I
put in the greater part of my time boosting the tick. It seems to be
coming easier. Will-power, I suppose. And then, of course, I talk a
good deal about her mother’s novels.”
“Have you read them?”
“Every damned one of them—for her sake. And if there’s a greater
proof of love than that, show me! My gosh, what muck that woman
writes! That reminds me, I’ve got to send to the bookshop for her
latest—out yesterday. It’s called The Stench of Life. A sequel, I
understand, to Grey Mildew.”
“Brave lad,” I said, pressing his hand. “Brave, devoted lad!”
“Oh, I’d do more than that for her.” He smoked for a while in
silence. “By the way, I’m going to propose to her to-morrow.”
“Already?”
“Can’t put it off a minute longer. It’s been as much as I could
manage, bottling it up till now. Where do you think would be the best
place? I mean, it’s not the sort of thing you can do while you’re
walking down the street or having a cup of tea. I thought of asking
her to have a round with me and taking a stab at it on the links.”
“You could not do better. The links—Nature’s cathedral.”
“Right-o, then! I’ll let you know how I come out.”
 “I wish you luck, my boy,” I said.

And what of Felicia, meanwhile? She was, alas, far from returning
the devotion which scorched Chester’s vital organs. He seemed to
her precisely the sort of man she most disliked. From childhood up
Felicia Blakeney had lived in an atmosphere of highbrowism, and the
type of husband she had always seen in her daydreams was the
man who was simple and straightforward and earthy and did not
know whether Artbashiekeff was a suburb of Moscow or a new kind
of Russian drink. A man like Chester, who on his own statement
would rather read one of her mother’s novels than eat, revolted her.
And his warm affection for her brother Crispin set the seal on her
distaste.
Felicia was a dutiful child, and she loved her parents. It took a bit
of doing, but she did it. But at her brother Crispin she drew the line.
He wouldn’t do, and his friends were worse than he was. They were
high-voiced, supercilious, pince-nezed young men who talked
patronisingly of Life and Art, and Chester’s unblushing confession
that he was one of them had put him ten down and nine to play right
away.
You may wonder why the boy’s undeniable skill on the links had no
power to soften the girl. The unfortunate fact was that all the good
effects of his prowess were neutralised by his behaviour while
playing. All her life she had treated golf with a proper reverence and
awe, and in Chester’s attitude towards the game she seemed to
detect a horrible shallowness. The fact is, Chester, in his efforts to
keep himself from using strong language, had found a sort of relief in
a girlish giggle, and it made her shudder every time she heard it.
His deportment, therefore, in the space of time leading up to the
proposal could not have been more injurious to his cause. They
started out quite happily, Chester doing a nice two-hundred-yarder
off the first tee, which for a moment awoke the girl’s respect. But at
the fourth, after a lovely brassie-shot, he found his ball deeply
embedded in the print of a woman’s high heel. It was just one of
those rubs of the green which normally would have caused him to
ease his bosom with a flood of sturdy protest, but now he was on his
guard.
“Tee-hee!” simpered Chester, reaching for his niblick. “Too bad, too
bad!” and the girl shuddered to the depths of her soul.
Having holed out, he proceeded to enliven the walk to the next tee
with a few remarks on her mother’s literary style, and it was while
they were walking after their drives that he proposed.
His proposal, considering the circumstances, could hardly have
been less happily worded. Little knowing that he was rushing upon
his doom, Chester stressed the Crispin note. He gave Felicia the
impression that he was suggesting this marriage more for Crispin’s
sake than anything else. He conveyed the idea that he thought how
nice it would be for brother Crispin to have his old chum in the family.
He drew a picture of their little home, with Crispin for ever popping in
and out like a rabbit. It is not to be wondered at that, when at length
he had finished and she had time to speak, the horrified girl turned
him down with a thud.
It is at moments such as these that a man reaps the reward of a
good upbringing.
In similar circumstances those who have not had the benefit of a
sound training in golf are too apt to go wrong. Goaded by the sudden
anguish, they take to drink, plunge into dissipation, and write vers
libre. Chester was mercifully saved from this. I saw him the day after
he had been handed the mitten, and was struck by the look of grim
determination in his face. Deeply wounded though he was, I could
see that he was the master of his fate and the captain of his soul.
“I am sorry, my boy,” I said, sympathetically, when he had told me
the painful news.
“It can’t be helped,” he replied, bravely.
“Her decision was final?”
“Quite.”
 “You do not contemplate having another pop at her?”
“No good. I know when I’m licked.”
I patted him on the shoulder and said the only thing it seemed
possible to say.
“After all, there is always golf.”
He nodded.
“Yes. My game needs a lot of tuning up. Now is the time to do it.
From now on I go at this pastime seriously. I make it my life-work.
Who knows?” he murmured, with a sudden gleam in his eyes. “The
Amateur Championship—”
“The Open!” I cried, falling gladly into his mood.
“The American Amateur,” said Chester, flushing.
“The American Open,” I chorused.
“No one has ever copped all four.”
“No one.”
“Watch me!” said Chester Meredith, simply.

It was about two weeks after this that I happened to look in on

Chester at his house one morning. I found him about to start for the
links. As he had foreshadowed in the conversation which I have just
related, he now spent most of the daylight hours on the course. In
these two weeks he had gone about his task of achieving perfection
with a furious energy which made him the talk of the club. Always
one of the best players in the place, he had developed an
astounding brilliance. Men who had played him level were now
obliged to receive two and even three strokes. The pro. himself
conceding one, had only succeeded in halving their match. The
struggle for the President’s Cup came round once more, and
Chester won it for the second time with ridiculous ease.