Humanising Language Teaching
Year 2; Issue 4; July 2000
These things happen
Mike Rundell 30 June 2000
Harold Macmillan, the British prime minister from 1957 to 1963, was once asked what worried him most and kept him awake at night. "Events, dear boy, events," he famously replied. However careful your plans, unpredictable things can occur that will blow you completely off course. There is an underlying schema here in which the status quo is assumed to be a desirable situation, so anything that "happens" is more likely to have a negative effect than to be a welcome development. And corpus data strongly bears this out: as linguists such as John Sinclair and Michael Stubbs noticed some time ago, the word happen has a strong tendency to be associated with unpleasant events. The same is true, even more strikingly, of its converse cause ("to make something happen"). Both verbs seem pretty neutral on the face of it, but it is impossible to look at concordances of either without being struck by their markedly downbeat flavour. For example:
the League of Nations. And this caused a flaming row at the school itched southern university voice caused amusement to North Country 37 agreement, which immediately caused anxiety at BOAC. American ternal field; an external field causes asymmetric pulses of ampli of conflict and contradiction, caused by a multiplicity of factor reduce the environmental damage caused by chip fabs. They hope to hese publications and the furore caused by Darwinian evolutionary t o The downfall of Athens was not caused by democracy as the Europea ducing the threat of nuclear war caused by suspicion or accident. ession between 1979 and 1981 was caused by too severe a financial s blem. The high energy plasma can cause damage at the semiconductor environmental degradation it has caused, demands that the impoveri ved wisdom that it is people who cause desertification. Deserts a cts at below world prices. This caused disquiet amongst Colonial o What the media should not do is cause friction and division within to overhead electric power lines causes health hazards. At least t aised to pay for the damage they caused in acid rain and global war f the excessive paperwork it was causing. In other words, dislike y with the dominant party, will cause increasing resentment. As a tribution problems have probably caused more deaths from starvatio
In well over 80% of cases, the objects of cause are , broadly speaking, somewhere on a cline between annoying and disastrous. Number-crunching software provides even more compelling evidence for this negative tendency: the latest corpus-inquiry tools enable automatic extraction of a word's most frequent and significant collocates, and in the case of the verb cause, the 20 nouns representing its most statistically-significant objects are all words for describing undesirable situations, the first 10 being: damage, harm, havoc, stir (which may sometimes, admittedly, have positive connotations), disruption, uproar, consternation, trouble, problem, distress. (If you want to talk about "causing something good", you are more likely to use either bring or bring about: this could bring about a dramatic transformation in their fortunes; talks that may bring peace to the region at last.)
This is one of the best-known instances of the phenomenon known as "semantic prosody", which we looked at briefly in an earlier column "slumped in front of the TV" . It is important to distinguish semantic prosody from mere "collocation": a collocate is a word that shows a strong tendency to co-occur with another word, but in many cases the range of possible collocates is – for reasons not fully understood – quite limited. For example, you can give someone a word of advice, or you can give them a piece or a bit of advice. But that is more or less it: these collocates are not readily exchangeable. Many semantically similar words (*a phrase of advice, ?a fragment or item of advice) simply do not fit the paradign – in other words, they are not collocates. The "right" collocations have to be learned, and these expressions do not allow much scope for generating fresh instances from the basic pattern.
Semantic prosody, however, works quite differently. In this case, corpus data allows us to see that a whole semantic class is regularly associated with a particular word (such as cause or happen). And the interesting point from a language-acquisition perspective is that if we understand the broad category of associated words, the pattern becomes more productively useful.
The generally negative semantic prosody of happen is especially well illustrated through a corpus search for the verb happen preceded by the words something, anything, or nothing. Where the nature of the event is made explicit (by adding an adjective after the pronoun), the situation is just as likely to be "good" as "bad": waiting for something exciting to happen, something magical has happened, nothing interesting ever happens here. But where the pronoun stands alone, things usually look grim:
it was my responsibility if anything happened. I was wrapped up in an o him and S-Sugar. Don't let anything happen. Let him come back, oh, plea and his staff in Beijing if anything happened to a Chinese diplomat in L fear attacked her. What if anything happened to her mother? As she lay x 's life is in danger. If anything happens to him, I'll see to it that the child baptized in case anything happens to it. We suggest that the It would break my heart, if anything happened to you. Later, comed ravan, we'd like, make sure nothing happened cos we were renting it, a ld in captivity by the CIA. Nothing happened to either Bitov or Yurchenk uo Then don't blame me if something happens," his mother said angrily hat you wouldn't notice if something happened right under your nose beca threat of lawsuits should something happen to a structure built outside Another worry was that, if something happened to Dr Ting, the team he ha he stopped me and said has something happened to your mother? And I said
All of which is a good argument for ever larger corpora, because these patte?s only emerge clearly when you have a lot of data to play with. As our text resources grow and dictionary descriptions improve, there will be more insights like this that teachers and learners can benefit from.************************
Michael Rundell is a lexicographer, and has been using corpora since the early 1980s. As Managing Editor of Longman Dictionaries for ten years (1984-94) he edited the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (1987, 1995) and the Longman Language Activator (1993). He has been involved in the design and development of corpus materials of various types, including the BNC and the Longman Learner Corpus. He is now a freelance consultant, and (with the lexicographer Sue Atkins and computational linguist Adam Kilgarriff) runs the "Lexicography MasterClass" (http://www.lexmasterclass.com), providing training courses in all aspects of dictionary development and dictionary use.
