Consonance in English Proverbs and Collocations

Seth Lindstromberg, UK

Seth Lindstromberg teaches at Hilderstone College, England. Aside from teaching, his main professional interest is ways of applying cognitive linguistics in language teaching. E-mail: lindstromberg@gmail.com; www.sethlindstromberg.info

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Introduction
Who has been interested in these patterns and why?
Consonance again: How common is it in English proverbs?
How common is consonance in common strong collocations?
Notes
References

Introduction

There is good evidence that some patterns of sound repetition make English phrasal vocabulary, or ‘chunks’, relatively easy for EFL learners to remember (Boers & Lindstromberg, 2009, 2012). This matters because some of these patterns are rather common in chunks of some kinds – as we will see. But what are ‘patterns of sound repetition’? To begin to answer this question in a concrete way, I offer the following two excerpts from the Wikipedia entry for ‘proverb’. (The extra comment in square brackets is by me.):

“Typical stylistic features of proverbs (as Shirley Arora points out in her article, ‘The perception of proverbiality’, 1984) are:

• Alliteration (Forgive and forget)
• Parallelism (Nothing ventured, nothing gained) [A ‘parallel’ proverb has two halves that share the same syntactic structure. Typically, there is some repetition of words and/or affixes.]
• Rhyme (When the cat is away, the mice will play)
• Ellipsis (Once bitten, twice shy)

“In some languages, assonance, the repetition of a vowel, is also exploited in forming artistic proverbs, such as the following extreme example from Oromo, of Ethiopia.

• kan mana baala, a’laa gaala (A leaf at home, but a camel elsewhere; somebody who has a big reputation among those who do not know him well.) ” …

“Internal features that can be found [in proverbs] quite frequently include:

• Hyperbole (All is fair in love and war)
• Paradox (For there to be peace there must first be war)
• Personification (Hunger is the best cook)”

Actually, I will say no more about hyperbole, paradox, personification and other semantic tropes: I just included that part of the Wikipedia entry because it’s interesting in itself. Nor am I going to say more about ellipsis (i.e., omission of words that will be understood as being there even if they aren’t). Instead, I’m going to continue to focus on patterns of sound repetition. In case Wikipedia hasn’t made it quite clear enough what these are, let’s delve a bit deeper:

Assonance is one pattern of sound repetition mentioned in the quote above. This is the repetition of the same vowel sound within two or more words in the same chunk (e.g., idiom, collocation, proverb, cliché). In general, each such vowel is in the most prominent syllable of a content word (e.g., noun, verb, adjectives) rather than in a function word (e.g., article, pronoun, auxiliary verb). Oddly, Wikipedia doesn’t give an example of assonance in English, so here are three: go for broke (an idiom), a peace keeper (a compound noun), and tough luck (a strong collocation and situational cliché).

Another pattern mentioned in the Wikipedia quote is alliteration. This is when, within the same chunk, two or more words begin with the same consonant. Typically, these ‘host words’ are content words. Alliteration is not, however, the only type of consonant repetition. There is also consonance. Put simply, this is any pattern of inter-word consonant repetition that isn’t alliteration Rubber ball is an example. Much of the consonance seen in English chunks probably has little if any perceptual or cognitive impact. Take, for example, the proverb, There’s safety in numbers. Here there are two occurrences of /z/ (see the underlines), but both are in positions where they are unlikely to have much perceptual or cognitive impact. Specifically, neither /z/ sound is in a content word and neither precedes a stressed vowel. Some consonance, though, is very ‘heavy’. Consider the phrase in mysterious circumstances. Here, there are two occurrences of /t/ and five occurrences of /s/. Could it be that such heavy consonance can make a chunk extra easy to remember? This is something we will return to further below.

Before that, note that consonance is nowhere mentioned in the Wikipedia entry quoted from above. This is typical. Among patterns of sound repetition consonance is largely neglected – which is one reason I’m writing about it. Before we come back to it, let’s take a brief look at two additional types of sound repetition.

The first of these, rhyme, has already been mentioned. In contrast to alliteration, it is a word-end phenomenon. Interestingly, rhyme always includes assonance and – usually –consonance too. In the collocation deep sleep, for example, we see that there are two /i:/ sounds and two /p/ sounds as well. Examples of rhyme without consonance are, go with the flow and When the cat’s away, the mice will play. Like alliteration and assonance, rhyme is mainly found in prominent syllables rather than weak, unstressed ones. I very much doubt, for instance, that many native-speakers of English would say that computer programmer is a phrase that rhymes. This is because the –er endings are, phonetically, very weak.

The last sound pattern I’ll touch on is slant rhyme– also called ‘near rhyme’. Here are two examples: in actual fact and gas mask. In each of these expressions, a vowel + consonant combination recurs, but at least one of these occurrences is not at word end.

Who has been interested in these patterns and why?

It seems safe to say that throughout time it has mainly been ‘word artists’ (poets, singers, song writers, and – latterly – writers of advertising slogans) who have been most interested (in a conscious way) in patterns of sound repetition. Many of these people will have been primarily concerned with aesthetics and/or the art of persuasion. Some too may have believed (correctly, it turns out) that rhyme, alliteration, and assonance facilitate the memorization of texts ranging in length from rhymes to epics (Rubin, 1995). There will, in addition, have been language learners and teachers to whom it may have seemed that patterns of sound repetition can aid the recall of phrasal vocabulary. However, hard evidence for this facilitative effect seems not to have begun to emerge until fairly recently (e.g., Lindstromberg and Boers, 2005, 2008a/b). Another thing that has only recently become clear is how common some patterns of sound repetition are in English chunks of some kinds. For example, Frank Boers found, by counting through the Collins Cobuild Dictionary of Idioms (2002, 2^nd edn.), that nearly 18% of the idioms it defines show alliteration and another 2% rhyme (Boers & Lindstromberg., 2009: 114). Adding assonant idioms into the count would probably raise the overall percentage to something like 25%. This is good news for learners and teachers of EFL because it means that a sizeable proportion of English idioms that are common enough to be in a learner’s dictionary are likely to be relatively easy to remember – provided their meanings have been understood and their phonological form has been well noticed.

Consonance again: How common is it in English proverbs?

After being involved in several experimental investigations of the extent to which alliteration and assonance aid recollection of L2 English chunks, Frank Boers and I began to wonder, “What about consonance?” However, a fairly long search for relevant findings from previous research turned up basically nothing. I decided therefore to go back to square one and try to see for myself approximately how common consonance is in a couple of kinds English chunks. Because proverbs are known to be especially rich in patterns of repetition, I decided to start with them.

After not much additional looking, I found this site:

www.manythings.org/c/r.cgi/proverbs (Kelly and Kelly, 1998). One thing that’s good about this site, from the point of view of a researcher who hasn’t got time to look at every single proverb in the language, is that it generates more or less randomized selections of proverbs from a largish pool. My procedure was to keep calling up randomized lists until I had collected over 100 different proverbs. I then went through this list and crossed off each proverb getting fewer than 400,000 Google ‘exact wording’ hits (in January, 2011). That left 54 proverbs of high to moderately high frequency as proverbs go. I examined these 54 carefully and deleted all which show any repetition of whole words or endings (e.g., United we stand, divided we fall; Let bygones be bygones). That removed 13 (24%) of the proverbs. Then I removed three showing rhyme (5.5% of 54). Then I deleted ones showing alliteration (e.g., Look before you leap; Two’s company and three’s a crowd). That removed ten more proverbs (18.5%). Next, I deleted proverbs showing assonance (e.g., There’s no place like home; Time flies). That removed 13 more (24%). Lastly, I deleted four proverbs (7.5%) showing either no pattern of sound repetition at all (e.g., To err is human) or else consonant repetition which seems weak (e.g., Love makes the world go round; Charity begins at home; There’s safety in numbers). In making this last set of deletions I was guided by research by what phoneticians (e.g., Ladefoged, 2001) and experimental pyschologists (e.g., Keating, Wright, and Zhang, 2001; Redford and Diehl, 1999; Stemberger and Treiman, 1986; Treiman, 1985) have learned about how consonants vary in perceptibility and/or cognitive ‘bulk’ according to where they occur in a linguistic unit such as a syllable or word.

After all those deletions, there remained 13 proverbs (24% of 54) showing a form of consonance that might have significant perceptual or cognitive impact. Here they are:

How common is consonance in common strong collocations?

All those Google hits notwithstanding, it might be objected, “It doesn’t matter whether consonance is common in proverbs because proverbs do not in fact matter much in modern English usage.” If this seems a reasonable contention to you, I recommend an excellent article by Jonathan Charteris-Black (1999) in DeProverbio (an online journal about proverbs). In this article, Charteris-Black shows that the English proverb is alive and well. More specifically, he shows why recent counts of English proverbs conducted in electronic corpora are likely to have drastically underestimated how often people use proverbs in contemporary discourse. He notes, for example, that the proverb A new broom sweeps clean turned up only once in a corpus of 330 million words. Yet when he searched for ‘non-canonical’ (i.e., partial or altered) occurrences, he found 110! Here are some of the examples he gives:

…Leicester meet Rosslyn Park. The new broom that swept in with the new season…
…Avenue are back again. But the new broom seems to have swept…
…he recalls. "It needed a new broom, innovation and marketing. Instead,…
…in the desert. Under Monty's new broom, and working closely with RAF…
…John Robins, the new broom at Guardian, the UK composite, has…
…1m rights issue this week, as new-broom chairman Ron Trenter seeks to beef…
…Sir: In your editorial "New Broom for Ulster Unionism"…
…is therefore on hold until a new broom arrives at the Vatican. Given John…
…reap the rewards of Dieter Bock's new broom. Latest word in the City is to…

It is important to realize that variant forms like these are likely to be incomprensible to anyone ignorant of the full form of the proverbs they correspond to.

Before finishing with proverbs and moving on to consonance in another kind of English chunk, I’ll mention two other reasons why proverbs are worth the attention of EFL learners and their teachers. Firstly, a typical proverb expresses a lot of meaning. Secondly (and relatedly), proverbs tend to be used at critical points in discourse. They are used, for example, to justify or characterize a decision or to pass judgement on an event, story, or a state of affairs (Lauhakangas, 2007). And one last thing here, although it’s a bit of a digression: like proverbs, the canonical forms of idioms also tend to occur with very low frequency, even in very large corpora (Moon, 1998) such as the British National Corpus. But, like proverbs again, they are especially likely to occur at crucial points in discourse such as when someone is summing up their view of what has just been said (O’Keeffe, et al., 2007: 89-91); further, their frequencies are often underestimated by standard counting procedures that overlook altered forms (Herrera & White, 2010; see also Philip, 2005, who remarks that several kinds of chunk are generally more common in altered than in canonical form.)

Notes

Some of the sound repetition we find in chunks will certainly be there by accident. But some is not there by accident. Using different means of discovery, Frank Boers and Stefan Gries have both found that there is more alliteration in English chunks than would be there by chance alone Boers & Lindstromberg, 2009, chapter 6; Gries, 2011).It would seem therefore that alliteration must have a purpose: perhaps that of highlighting the host chunk and so increasing its rhetorical impact. Much the same might be true of other patterns of sound repetition including, maybe, some forms of consonance. So, let’s see how common consonance is in another kind of English chunk, strong collocations. The ones we are going to consider are probably all much more common than any proverb.

Using the free search facility generously provided by The Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davis 2008 to present), I examined 42 adjectives chosen from two separate lists of most common adjectives. The first list was found at two sites, one being: www.linguarama.com/ps/293-6.htm The other list was found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_common_words_in_English

These adjectives are: [List 1] new, good, better, best, free, fresh, delicious, full, sure, clean, wonderful, special, crisp, fine, big, great, real, easy, bright, extra, safe, rich; [List 2] first, last, long, little, own, other, old, right, high, different, small, large, next, early, young, important, few, public, bad, same. From the second list I omitted words occurring also on list one. I also omitted able since its very common occurrence in the phrasal auxiliary (e.g., be able to) seemed to be a distraction.

For each adjective, I called up its 10 most frequent rightward collocates. I therefore examined 420 collocations in all. Even after discounting all cases of consonance in collocations that also show alliteration (e.g., wonderful world), assonance (special effects) and near alliteration (e.g., big problem, in which /b/ and /p/ are both bilabial stops), I found that 127 (30%) show consonance. Here, for example, are the top 10 rightward collocates of new as given by COCA on January 3-7, 2011:

new: year, world, book, generation, technology, ways, ones, ideas, technologies, information

As can be seen, five of the ten collocates show consonance with new, although the consonance seen in new ones may be rather weak. Assuming, for the moment, that consonance can facilitate recall, this proportion is far from trivial. Even if 37% is an over-estimate of significantly impactful consonance by a factor of two, three, or even four, that would still leave a lot of consonance with potential to make collocations relatively easy for learners to remember. But...it is not yet known (so far as I am aware) whether even very heavy consonance can make English chunks easier for learners to recall or not. It seems plausible that it could. Together with other patterns of sound repetition, consonance might turn out to be one of the factors that make proverbs in particular so easy to remember, even though – as chunks go – they are rather long.

The matter is currently under investigation, so watch this space!

References

Arora, S. 1984. The perception of proverbiality. Proverbium, 1:1-38.

Boers, F. & S. Lindstromberg. (2005) Finding ways to make phrase-learning feasible: the mnemonic effect of alliteration. System 33: 225-38.

Boers, F. & S. Lindstromberg. (2009) Optimizing a Lexical Approach to Instructed Second Language Acquisition. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan.

Boers, F. & S. Lindstromberg. (2012, forthcoming). Experimental and intervention studies of formulaic sequences in a second language. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics.

Boers, F., S. Lindstromberg, & J. Eyckmans. (2012) Are alliterative word combinations relatively easy to remember for adult learners? RELC, 43(1): 127-135.

Charteris-Black, J. 1999. The survival of English proverbs: a corpus-based account. DeProverbio, 5(2). Retrieved on May 5, 2012 from:
www.deproverbio.com/display.php?a=3&r=96

Davies, M. 2008 to present. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Retrieved on various dates in 2011 and 2012 from: www.americancorpus.org

Gries, S. (2011) Phonological similarity in multi-word symbolic units. Cognitive Linguistics, 22(3), 491-510.

Herrera, H. & M. White. (2010) Canonicity and variation in idiomatic expressions: evidence from business press headlines. In S. De Knop, F. Boers, and A. De Rycker (eds), Fostering Language Teaching Efficiency through Cognitive Linguistics, pp. 1677-187. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Keating, P., R.Wright & J. Zhang. (2001) Word-level asymmetries in consonant articulation. UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics, 97. 157-173. Retrieved on May 5, 2012 from: www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/keating/word.pdf

Kelly, C. & L. Kelly. (1998) Retrieved on May 4, 2012 from:
www.manythings.org/c/r.cgi/proverbs

Ladefoged, P. (2001) Vowels and Consonants: An Introduction to the Sounds of Languages. Malden, MA & Oxford: Blackwell.

Lauhakangas, O. (2007) Use of proverbs and narrative thought. Folklore, 35: 77-84. Retrieved on May 5, 2012 from: www.folklore.ee/folklore/vol35/lauhakangas.pdf

Lindstromberg, S. & F. Boers. (2008a) The mnemonic effect of noticing alliteration in lexical chunks. Applied Linguistics, 29(2). 200-222.

Lindstromberg, Seth & Frank Boers. (2008b) Phonemic repetition and the learning of lexical chunks: The mnemonic power of assonance. System, 36(3). 423-436.

Moon, R. (1998) Fixed Expressions and Idioms in English: A Corpus-Based Approach. Oxford: Clarendon House.

O’Keeffe, A., M. McCarthy and R. Carter (2007) From Corpus to Classroom: Language Use and Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Philip, G. (2005) Discovering clines of variation: the location and analysis of non-canonical forms in general reference corpora. Presented at: Phraseology 2005: The many faces of Phraseology. An interdisciplinary conference, 13-15 October 2005,

Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. Retrieved on May 5, 2012 from:
http://amsacta.cib.unibo.it/1132/1/VariationInCorpus.pdf

Redford, M. & R. Diehl. (1999) The relative perceptual distinctiveness of initial and final consonants in CVC syllables. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 106(3). 1555–1565.

Rubin, D. (1995). Memory in Oral Traditions: The Cognitive Psychology of Epic, Ballads, and Counting-out Rhymes. London: Oxford University Press.

Stemberger, J. & R. Treiman. (1986) The internal structure of word-initial consonant clusters. Journal of Memory and Language, 25(2). 163-180.

Treiman, R. (1985) Onsets and rimes as units of spoken syllables: evidence from children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 39(1). 161-181.

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