How Words Work

" The meaning of a lexical item is the product of the way in which it relates to other words and, at the same time, to non-linguistic reality." - David Wilkins, Second Language Learning and Teaching (Edward Arnold,1974)

The main factors that influence a word's meaning in context are: Position,
Focus,
Collocation,
Syntax,
Register,
Connotation,
Complementation,
Morphology.

To illustrate the effect that some of these aspects of vocabulary can have on meaning, the following phrases can be considered:

a) a naked man, naked aggression, the naked eye

It would be difficult for non-native speakers to predict the second and third of these two collocations, equally it would be easy to fall into errors such as "naked leg" or "naked head" instead of bare leg/head. Collocation is unsettling for learners because it is idiomatic rather than rule bound but, nevertheless, it is a very important feature of the behaviour of vocabulary.

b) he advised us to go, he recommended that we should go, he suggested going

The overlap in denotation of these 3 verbs is clear but in fact it is not only denotative meaning which determines their use. The crucial factor here is the pattern of complementation appropriate to each verb.

c) a boring book, a bored person, an interesting film, an interested audience

These are old chestnuts in the long list of easily confused words, yet I have seldom seen teachers coming to grips with the two issues which explain what is happening: morphology and focus. The adjectival use of the past participial form focuses attention on the experiencer; the adjectival use of the present participle focuses attention on what is experienced.

The following sections deal with these aspects of the interrelation between the linguistic behaviour of words and their referential meaning and how teachers might take a systematic approach to explaining such behaviour to equip learners how to understand how words work.

Position

If adjectives are grouped for teaching purposes only in sense clusters, learners will have no understanding of how the position of adjectives is a vital part of understanding their use. Typical clusters might be:

young, old, middle-aged;

tall, short, little, medium-built;

afraid, anxious, worried.

It is easy to contextualise adjectives presented in this way, but each cluster contains a potential pitfall:

My old friend/my friend is old
a little boy/a boy is little (not attested)
an anxious mother/ a worried parent/an afraid father (not

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