Time40 min

 

As you know by now, on many occassions words are not freely combined by speakers because, despite the different possibilities we have at our disposal to express our ideas, we always tend to use the same prefabricated chunks (or collocations) stored in our memory as a whole. For instance, whereas it would be grammatically and semantically acceptable to say "I will talk about my opinion", nobody would use that expression because the collocation "I will give my opinion" is the arbitrarily ready-made combination everybody uses. Since these recurrent lexical combinations represent a single choice for speakers and they are relatively fixed and institutionalised in the language, having a good collocational competence will help you improve your accuracy and fluency as you will not need to stop to choose every single word you use. Therefore, it is of paramount importance for you to be aware of the existence of collocations and to learn to identify them in the input you receive.

Task F

By now, you should have a clear idea of what a collocation is. Try to identify all the collocations included in the following text and underline them in Assignment 3 of module 3. Remember that, from now on, you should always be aware of the collocations you find when reading or listening to an English text in order to help you remember the most frequent ones and improve your English.

After giving Mark a lift to the airport, Cathy made her way home. What an exciting life he led! At times Cathy felt desperately jealous of him. She spent her time doing little more than taking care of him and the children. Now her sister was getting divorced and would doubtless be making demands on her too. Cathy had promised to give her sister a call as soon as she got home but she decided to run herself a bath first. She had a sharp pain in her side and hoped that a hot bath might ease the pain. After giving her sister a ring Cathy went to bed.

In the morning, Cathy did some work in the garden, then took a rest for about an hour before going out to do some shopping in town. It was her sisters' birthday and she wanted to cook a nice meal for her. She had a look at a new Thai cookery book in the bookshop and decided to buy it. It has some very easy recipes and Cathy managed to make a good impression with her very first Thai meal.

(Text adapted from McCarthy, M. and O'Dell, F. 2005. English Collocations in Use. Cambridge: CUP)
Task G

In this task, you will read some sentences which include collocations highlighted in bold letters. Some of those collocations are correct but in some of them we have combined a wrong adjective or verb with the noun (the noun is always correct). Correct the wrong collocations by providing the appropriate adjective or verb in each case.

Use the Cobuild Concordance Sampler to check whether the collocations are acceptable or not (don´t forget to write the symbol + between words) and to look for the appropriate adjective or verb (the one which expresses the same meaning as the one you are given in the sentence) which combines with the noun provided (remember that you need to write VERB+the+noun or JJ+noun to search for all the possible verbs or adjectives that combine with a given noun).

Once you have corrected all the wrong collocations, give a Spanish equivalent expression for every collocation (remember that you can see the meaning of collocations by searching them in the Corpus Concordance Sampler and reading some of the sentences where the collocations appear).

Complete this task in Assignment 4 of module 3.

The sentences you have to work with are the following:

It's a moving and exciting film and shows off Oxford and it's countryside to its best advantage.

When, in 1609, Galileo constructed his first telescopes and trained them on the heavens, he made dramatic discoveries. He saw that there were many stars invisible to the naked eye.

As well as the 5 Sky Channels, you can tune into more English and foreign language channels, with more planned in the close future.

People soon decided sides either for or against what came to be known as the Council's "green belt" or "anti-dispersal" policy.

The Streamline Graded Readers series has been specially designed to meet the needs of students at the lower levels of language learning and to ensure the ease of reading which will keep students encouraged and motivated.

An incredible lot of writers have had other means of earning a living, but still, surely, have the right to have "writer" carved on their tombstones.

"Were you an only child?" He shook his head. "I had a sister, younger than me".

This treatment and the prescribed antibiotics started to make effect and after 4 days Mr Brown's temperature returned to normal levels and his chest sounded clear.

However you feel, do an effort to sound happy every time you speak.

She has strong views on a wide range of issues.

 


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