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SHORT ARTICLES

Following the Patterns: Colligation and the Necessity of a Bottom-up Approach to Grammar

Hugh Dellar, UK

Hugh Dellar is a teacher and teacher trainer at University of Westminster, London. He is also the co-author of two five-level series of General English coursebooks, Innovations and Outcomes, both published by National Geographic Learning. He is also working on a methodology book entitled Teaching Lexically, which will be published by Delta Publishing. E-mail: hughdellar@mac.com

Definition

For a term that has been around in ELT circles for over half a century now, colligation has made depressingly few inroads into the mainstream of our profession. In this brief overview of its meaning and of the implications I feel it has for everyday classroom practice I shall be suggesting that in the light of recent research perhaps its time has finally come.

The idea of colligation was coined by the British linguist J.R. Firth (1890-1960) and was originally defined as “the interrelation of grammatical categories in syntactical structures.” Over time, the meaning has shifted slightly and is now broadly used to describe the grammatical patterns that words often take. If you prefer, colligation exists in a relationship with collocation. Where collocation describes the words that words often co-occur with (heavy traffic, rancid butter, gain respect, and so on), colligation describes the grammatical patterns that words frequently take – the grammatical collocations of the words, if that makes any more sense. Michael Hoey, whose masterwork Lexical Priming is one of the definitive studies of the phenomenon, puts it like this:

“The basic idea of colligation is that just as a lexical item may be primed to co-occur with another lexical item, so it may also be primed to occur in or with a particular grammatical function. Alternatively, it may be primed to avoid appearance in or co-occurrence with a particular grammatical function.” (Hoey 2005:43)

Example

To give just one example, consider the fact that verbs of perception such as hear, notice, see, watch and so on often colligate with an object that precedes them and an –ing form that follows, as in these sentences:

I heard you coming in last night.
I noticed him hanging around outside the house last night, actually.
I heard someone screaming outside.
I saw him playing live when I was in Belgrade earlier in the year.

Impact on output

So what, I hear you asking? What does all this have to do with classroom practice? Well, quite a lot I would argue. When students tell you, as so many of mine have told me over the years that they “know words”, but still “have problems with grammar”, what they may well actually mean is that they struggle when they try to use the words they think know because the words neither colligate nor collocate in the way they expect them to – or in the way they try to make them work in English, because they’re bringing over their L1 primings with them and these are affecting the way they’re producing the items in L2.

When a student whose first language is Spanish says I am agree or It is depend of my girlfriend or My father wants that I study Law are these grammar mistakes? Certainly not if we think about grammar in the traditional ELT way of studying tense forms and meaning, conditionals, modals and so on; rather, this is micro-grammatical. These are problems with the grammar that attaches itself to particular words (in this instance - agree, depend and want) and whilst the students may think they ‘know’ these words, they’ve failed to factor in colligation. Any serious correction of such output has to attempt to break the L1 primings and to make students notice the gap between L1 usage and English usage.

Correction

Of course, once you realise this, it’s obviously then not only colligation that becomes important, but also co-text: the language that’s frequently used near or around the language you’re teaching, so in the instances above, this might mean correcting to something like this:

I agree (with you).
I totally agree with you.
I half-agree, I suppose / guess.
It depends on my girlfriend.
I’m not really sure yet, to be honest. It depends what my girlfriend wants to do.
It depends what time my girlfriend gets home.
It depends whether my girlfriend is going out that night
He wants me to study Law.
My dad’s quite pushy. He wants me to study Law, but I’m not really sure that I want to.

While providing this level of feedback can be arduous and demanding of both our time and our capabilities, it’s nevertheless one of the only real ways that students will ever be made more aware of how the way they think the language works differs from the way it actually works. Without input that says what they were trying to say themselves, but in a slightly more complex and (grammatically) sophisticated way, students’ chances of progressing past the level they’re currently at are reduced.

Of course, much of what we regard as error sadly doesn’t fit into such neat boxes, but I’d still suggest that the vast bulk of it has far less to do with structural grammar as it’s narrowly conceived within ELT and far more to do with the way individual items both colligate and of course collocate. Take this sentence from one of my Intermediate student’s homework last week:

Drive carefully! It’s a really thick fog outside.
Again, it’s worth asking what the real issue is here. Is it grammar? Or is it a failure to really be able to deploy the word FOG effectively? My feedback was as follows:
Drive carefully! ~~It’s a~~ There’s really thick fog outside.
(FOG is uncountable, so no article)
You could also say: It’s really foggy outside.
It’s grammar, Jim, but not (perhaps) as you know it.

Classroom implications

If you go along with what I’ve said so far, perhaps the main implication for the classroom, apart from the way we think about correction, reformulation and feedback, is that we need to take more time when teaching ‘words’ and factor colligation and collocation in when getting examples to the students. We need to take the issue of priming more seriously than perhaps we have been doing thus far, and we need to ensure that students learn words with the other words they’re often used with and with the grammar they often colligate with.

Just say, for instance, that you’re teaching an Intermediate class, and the word FOG comes up. Instead of simply giving a translation or an explanation – “Fog is a thick cloud that you get close to the ground or to the water and that’s hard to see through” – we need to be thinking more about showing students examples of how the word is typically used. This may mean we write / say / email after class examples such as the following:

The fog was so thick that we couldn’t even see fifty feet in front of us.
All flights out of Heathrow have been cancelled because of the fog.
Be careful how you drive tonight. The fog is really thick out there.

Of course this takes a little longer, but it’s time well spent. Whilst it helps prime students in the micro-grammar (and collocation – and co-text) of the word in question, it also allows a linguistically sensitive teacher to draw attention to other more macro-grammatical issues, so one could ask, for example:

“HAVE BEEN CANCELLED. What tense is that? Right. Present perfect. Because it happened in the past, but there’s a present result, yeah. No flights now. And is it active or passive? Right, passive. Because have BEEN cancelled, yeah? Cancelled by someone, by the air traffic control people. Well done. Just checking.”

The power of translation

One final mention needs to be made here of perhaps the single best way of ensuring students get their heads round colligation and the impact that their own L1 primings have on the way they often attempt to make English work – and that’s two-way translation. I’ve long been encouraging students to keep record books where the pages are divided in half, and on the left they write new sentences in English, whilst on the right they translate into L1, so they might have something like this:

He wants me to study Law. Él quiere que yo estudiara derecho.

Translation into L1 is usually pretty easy, assuming the item has been explained clearly. What’s much harder is to return to the L1 version at a later date and to then reproduce EXACTLY the English version. Half of all students who try this kind of thing will come up with He wants that I study Law as their first attempt. By comparing what they think the English should be with what it really is, they come up against concrete evidence of how L1 affects L2 and are forced to start paying more attention to colligation: the issue that all students need to spend the bulk of their grammar study time on.

References

Firth, J. R. (1968) Linguistic Analysis as a Study of Meaning, Palmer F. R.

Firth, J. R. (1968) A Synopsis of Linguistic Theory 1930-1955, Palmer F. R.