Illustrative Sentences

These days, we prefer to choose illustrative sentences from real language, rather than make sentences up. Gone are the days of Your postillion has been struck by lightning. Real language tends to be much richer and makes for better learner input.

Illustrative sentences in teaching are used as:

• • examples

  • exercises

  • test questions

This is not the same as illustrative sentences in dictionaries, which are more likely to show the meaning of a word than demonstrate how the word is used. For productive purposes, language learners need to know the contexts in which a word is used:

• • textual context --> genre, field, domain

  • word context --> collocation, semantic preference, semantic prosody

  • grammatical context --> colligation

Criteria for choosing illustrative sentences

http://bit.ly/maelt_ill_sents

Terms:

• • Genre: an identifiable category of artistic composition, e.g. the novel, research paper, letter of appointment. A genre is a communicative event which uses texts in predictable ways to achieve agreed communicative purposes.

  • Field: sport, music, aviation etc

  • Domain: the situation in which language is used. eg family domain, work domain.

Collocations of ugly from BNC.

logdice statistic

5- to 5+

Correctness

Because corpora are typically collections of attested language, the corpus compilers do not correct spelling or grammar and neither do they hide taboo words behind fig leaves. Therefore corpora contain sentences with “undesirable” language. In terms of input and efficiency, it is important to choose sentences that are accurate.

Sentence Length

An illustrative sentence should not be very long: twenty words is plenty. But it should not be so short that there is not enough context.

Textual context

The most frequent vocabulary items tend to constitute the core vocabulary of a language. But outside this core, a lot of vocabulary is context specific. Take for example, the differences between these sets of so-called synonyms:

• • spectators, audience, crowd, viewers

  • interval, half time, intermission

  • staff, crew, team, troop, troupe

  • moreover, furthermore, in addition,what’s more

  • footpath, sidewalk, pavement

  • blond, blonde

While the propositional meaning would probably not be obscured if one were used in place of the other, each word belongs to a specific context, and needs to be correctly illustrated.

Word context

Although we could choose from among many words to go with other words, we tend to use standard formulations. Strong and typical collocation tendencies need to be represented in illustrative sentences. For example, the most typical collocates of consensus are:

Verb: reach (85 times), achieve (32) and emerge (30).

Adjective: general consensus (61)

Phrase: a consensus of opinion (38)

Preposition: among (70)

The collocate list of words five to the left and to the right of ugly.

Colligation

Illustrative sentences should represent typical grammatical patterning. For example, reach a consensus is usually S + V (reach) + O (consensus). When it doesn’t appear in this order, it is passive (consensus + be + reached). Unless there is a good reason, consensus is rarely the subject of reach, e.g. This active consensus reached a peak at Christmas 1984. For example, given that emerge is an intransitive verb, consensus is typically (27 times out of 30) the subject of emerge: S (consensus) + V (emerge), e.g., ... a consensus is emerging that the primary need is to identify problems, ...

Polysemy

There is a tendency in language for the most frequent words to have the most meanings. But a very high proportion of words have more than one meaning anyway. And very often the meaning that is intended is realised by the collocation, colligation or context.

Example 1: what does accept mean? How is accept used? What things do we accept? a phonecall, a job, a gift, suggestion, excuse, argument, my role in life, into a club/course, task. Are these all the same meanings? When can someone say that they know the word accept? And how do we know which meaning of a word is intended?

Example 2: look up manage in Metatrans

Lexical support

The co-occurrence of words that have related meanings with the target word, e.g., hyponyms, hypernyms, antonyms, synonyms, etc. See Wordnet.

If we want language learners to infer the meaning of a word from some illustrative sentences, choose ones that contain lexical support.

Look at the collocations of ugly on the right, for example, to see how many similar words appear in its contexts.

And see Jean Aitchison's work on the word wimp.

Chunks

It is useful to illustrate the phrases that words typically occur in. Phrases in English is a corpus-based web tool that allows users to find phrases that occur with a given word.

Concreteness

Avoid sentences that don’t have specific reference, especially where pronouns occupy subject and object positions. The following sentences illustrate the collocation of importance with overestimate. In the first sentence, we do not know who “he” is and we do not know what “its” is. Sentence 2 is far more tangible.

• • After this it may be possible to evaluate whether he did <overestimate> its importance

  • It is not possible to <overestimate> the importance of the role of the conscience in human affairs ..

Position of the Word

For the purpose of gapping single, de-contextualised sentences, the rule of thumb is to have the target word towards the end of the sentence. This provides as much context for the word as possible before the reader encounters it. This is another argument against sentences that are too short. Of course, some words, such as linking adverbials (conjuncts), have a preference for appearing early in a sentence.

Relevance, contemporaneousness

Sentences referring to extinct currencies, that do not recognise the EU, that refer to almost obsolete things like travellers cheques can be avoided.

Note also:

Ironic sentences can give the wrong impression of a word’s core meaning, use or connotation.

(c) James Thomas 2006