lex assignment

Lexical Studies Assignment | Andy Boon | June 9th, 2002

During an advanced English vocab lesson, one of my students was instructed by the course book to read an article and match the words in bold type to its related expression in a separate word list. A problem occurred when the student was asked to match BIAS to its related expression. The expression chosen by the course book to explain BIAS for the student was PREJUDICE however the co-text of the sentence in the article also included the word PREJUDICE "the incident will create unfair prejudice and BIAS" that led to the student asking "How can BIAS be PREJUDICE?" This has therefore led me to question the overall usefulness of synonyms in Vocab teaching.

For my LEX assignment, I am trying to determine the differences and similarities between BIAS and PREJUDICE as well as the extent to which synonyms help students to acquire words.

I am about to analyse concordances for both lexical items but would be = glad of any comments, suggestions or ideas!!!

Andy in Japan

(and busy watching the World Cup when he should be studying!!)

Re: LEX assignment | Colin Graham | June 11th, 2002

Hi Andy,

I'm just about to start on LEX, so I'm coming at this from a grammar/etymological point of view:

This has therefore led me to question the overall usefulness of synonyms in Vocab teaching.

So long as you recognise that there are (never?) rarely exactly synonymous pairs, then I think you can usefully use synonyms for vocab teaching. With higher level students, sometimes the synonyms form grammatically similar blocks which allows grammar vocab to be more easily acquired- prepositions for example, "close to", "near to". Investigating the subtle differences can be fun, too- highlighting the overlap and the gaps between the two words.

I would question, like you I think, whether it is useful to learn the words as a synonymous block though (cut, carve, split, shave, slice...). Seems more like memorizing a thesaurus!

For my LEX assignment, I am trying to determine the differences and similarities between BIAS and PREJUDICE as well as the extent to which synonyms help students to acquire words.

I am about to analyse concordances for both lexical items but would be glad of any comments , suggestions or ideas!!!

Based on gut feeling, i.e. probably wrong!, I would expect both words to have similar grammatical partners: unfair bias/prejudice towards/against

I see bias as a weight or mass which pulls someone or something in a particular direction and that the bias is an inherent part of the nature or construction of the thing- e.g. crown green bowls. Often that bias is beyond the control of a society or a person because it is 'naturally' conditioned. Bias is corrected or correctable (corrigible?) only if you know it is there. Many male-biased cultures are not capable of correction because women aren't empowered to notice the bias, for example.

I see prejudice (following its derivation) as judging a situation or person before you gather any objective data about them.   This prejudging creates a bias (weight) against them but it has been deliberately introduced but the prejudicial person.

Choice of bias or prejudice may depend on how much control you see the biased/prejudiced person/society as having.   I think there's a kind of continuum:

bias------------------prejudice
natural---------------artificially created
inherent--------------deliberately introduced
unconscious-----------conscious
'objective'-----------(highly) subjective
uncontrolable---------(always) controlable [but correctable]

Both could be used in the grey area between, or regarded as synonyms in the middle part.

He showed unfair bias / prejudice towards any options other than his own.

Anyway back to you!

Colin
:-)

Re: LEX Assignment | Pinkie | June 11th, 2002

Hi Andy...

1) Colin wrote, "So long as you recognise that there are (never?) rarely exactly synonymous pairs, then I think you can   usefully use synonyms for vocab teaching". Agreed. I certainly think that clusters of words with related meaning are eminently sensible foci for vocabulary teaching and in lexicogrammatical reference materials. It's a shame that there isn't a nym word meaning "with related meaning at least in some contexts": there's "near-synonym", which is good for pairs like however/nevertheless, and perhaps bias/prejudice. How's about proxinym?

2) Colin suggests that bias is commonly inherent and prejudice more of an acquired thing. I certainly accept that prejudice is something only people generally display, whereas bias is a more generic term. But I don't know whether I'd bet much on Colin's distinction: though only corpus analysis will show!

3) My own gut feeling is that someone who's biased is more commonly biased IN FAVOUR OF, while someone who's prejudiced is more commonly prejudiced AGAINST. Though certainly both can be used either way, as Colin points out.

4) More proxinyms: leaning, predisposition, weighted, loaded...

5) And now for something COMPLETELY different. Does anyone know of any book/article which explicitly argues that the grammaticality ("Chomsky"), lexis ("Sinclair") and text-structure ("Halliday") approaches to linguistic description are best viewed as co-existing levels of analysis, not as competing theories?

Best wishes,

Pinkie (in Spain, doing very nicely in the World Cup!)

LEX: Reply to Andy | Kathy | June 12th, 2002

Andy,

I came across something similar with "aims and objectives" when my students asked me to explain the differences between the nouns: "aim, goal, objective and target". At the time I glibly stated that the meanings were basically the same but the one a native speaker would select at any given time would depend on the context. These Germans weren't satisfied with my wishy-washy answer, and so I spent restless days and nights trying to suss out the differences myself, and ended up writing my LEX paper about those naughty, unstable synonyms.

My approach was to compare them using several different corpora from various fields, roughly those of the students in my group (economics, pharmacy) plus where I was coming from (ELT and general). I found that the distribution was quite different depending on the field, yet the basic meaning was largely the same. Experts in the various fields boldly differentiated between them or conflated them in different ways, and it seemed to make a difference whether the writers happened to be American or British as well. The dictionaries I compared didn't help much except to give a few typical examples.

Let us know how you are progressing with bias and prejudice and good luck!

Kathy
Berlin

Halliclairsky or Sinchomday | Colin Graham | June 11th, 2002

Does anyone know of any book/article which explicitly argues that the grammaticality ("Chomsky"), lexis ("Sinclair") and text-structure ("Halliday") approaches to linguistic description are best viewed as co-existing levels of analysis, not as competing theories?

Hi Pinkie,

The closest thing I've found so far towards an acceptance of the 'conflicting' linguistic descriptions available is probably the opening 20 pages of David Brazil's "A Grammar of Speech" where he outlines the principles on which he is basing his approach to a descriptive grammar of spoken English.

For example:

"let us suppose that the abstraction we find in so many discussions of how language works is simply a consequence of starting the enquiry in a particular way" [p. 20]

So Halliday's way is to look at the clause, Sinclair's is to look at the word (in context) and Chomsky's is to look at the sentence i.e. no conflict because each has a separate point of departure.

Anyway, the full reference (and the whole book is definitely worth reading) is:

Brazil, D. (1995) A Grammar of Speech. Oxford:OUP

I'll let you know if I come across anything else.

BFN

Colin (in Japan, slightly sleepless and definitely NOT watching ANY kind of soccer matches... although it's nice that Japan has won one --- ooh, eleven players on a team.... Oh go to bed it's late)

Re: LEX assignment | Raymond Sheehan | June 12th, 2002

Any proxinymous suggestions for Jane Austen's... what was it again? Snobbery and Bias? Or Hemingway's, "A Goodbye to Weapons?"

Andy, when I did my LEX assignment a year ago, I started off by looking at how learner dictionaries deal with "synonyms." I looked at LASDE yesterday to check "bias" and "prejudice" and I think if/when you do the same you may come up with some very good areas for analysis. It would also be a good way to combine a pedagogical and linguistic focus.

Raymond
UAE

 

Archive Categories