The corpus principle – Language rules

What is a rule?

Penny has been living in Spain for a year and a half. Her friend Katie, who has never visited the country, has come to stay for a week. Here are four statements about the Spanish that Penny makes during breakfast one morning:

• They eat churros (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churros) on Sundays.
• They celebrate Christmas Eve rather than Christmas Day.
• Spanish children live with their parents until they get married.
• Little Spanish girls have their ears pierced very soon after they are born.

Human beings are experts at pattern recognition: We take in data, process it, and make conclusions. As Penny verbalises her conclusions, Katie correctly assumes that she cannot possibly be referring to all Spanish people in each case. Being a human being herself, Katie knows that such sweeping statements cannot be taken at face value.

On a different day, Penny might have taken certain precautions with the language she used:

• A lot of them eat churros on Sundays.
• They tend to celebrate Christmas Eve rather than Christmas Day.
• Spanish children often live with their parents until they get married.
• As a rule, little Spanish girls have their ears pierced very soon after they are born.

Look at this last sentence. Of course, the words as a rule do not refer to something that has to be done: there is no law in Spain that states that girls must have their ears pierced at a young age. Penny has merely described a pattern that she has observed which involves most Spanish girls.

Here are four more describable patterns:

• English adjectives go before English nouns.
• i before e except after c.
• To form the past simple and past participle of regular verbs, simply add -ed.
• ea is pronounced either /i:/ (as in heat) or /e/ (as in head).

Language teachers have a hard life. All we want to do is offer our learners information like this that will guide them with their new language. But all too often, they will insist that the information is 100% reliable. And this can result in frustration when they discover exceptions such as:

• Are you the person responsible? (Adjective after noun)
• Sheila is a little bit weird because she's addicted to codeine and caffeine (i after e)
• Travel? travelled (it was necessary to double the last letter before adding the -ed)
• A great steak (ea is pronounced /eI/)

Perhaps part of the problem is that many learners have a tendency to regard rules in language as being type 1 rather than type 2:

Rule type 1: A law or regulation

Rule type 2: An observation; a describable pattern

It can be useful to use the analogy between language rules and human behaviour patterns so that learners can appreciate why exceptions to rules exist. Some teachers don't even like to talk about rules. Some prefer the term 'rule of thumb' – a principle that guides rather than dictates. Whatever your approach, it is well worth letting learners see patterns for themselves once in a while and corpora print outs are an ideal resource for this purpose.

What follows are three student questions that arose in my classes and how I dealt with them.

Case study 1:  What's the difference between no and not?

When questions like this arise that you're not sure how to explain, the secret is not to panic. Pretend that you know the answer but that you want your students to see it for themselves.

If you have internet access in class, you could create an investigative activity there and then and give it to your learners as homework (it would be best to do this while they are engaged in a task or activity). However, it will probably be more convenient to prepare the activity for the next day.

Here is one idea that involves a couple of printouts from the British National Corpus.

1. Go to www.english-corpora.org/bnc/.
2. Enter the word no
3. Click return.
4. The search will tell you that the word appears 215,955 times in the corpus.
5. Click on 'NO'. You will be given 101 random contextualised examples of the word. Cut and paste them onto a Word document.
6. The resulting document will be long. You will now have to go crazy with the delete button: get rid of any useless examples as well as obscure or potentially confusing language. Shorten the pre-existing examples whenever possible and boil the document down to a single page.
7. Print off this sheet and make a copy for each learner.
8. Repeat steps 2–7 for the word not.
9. Give the sheets to your learners and have them look for patterns themselves (i.e. get them to make their own rules). There is a lot of scope for this. Here are a few observations that learners could make:

• No goes after there is, there are, there was and there were (there is no expansion, etc).
• No is included in phrases such as no longer than, no less than, no fewer than, no more than.
• Not follows auxiliaries (am, was, does, did, had, has, can, could, etc) to make negative sentences.
• Not can be part of a negative infinitive ('To be or not to be.').

Case study 2:  Which is most common – you're not or you aren't?

Questions like these are very difficult to answer. People use language differently according to who they are, what they do and where they come from. When answering the 'Which is more common' question, we should also take into account factors such as differences in written and spoken language.

Despite the potential complexity of the question, there is one very effective means of providing learners with information about how the item is used on the internet.

Here is a task that could be set for homework:

Google fight

• Go to Google and type in each of the following items.
• Make sure that you use the inverted commas as shown.
• Write the number of hits (or results) that are obtained for each item in the spaces provided.

                                                Number of hits

            "I am not"                    _________________

            "I'm not"                      _________________

            "I amn't"                      _________________

            "You are not"              _________________

            "You're not"                _________________

            "You aren't"                _________________

            "He is not"                  _________________

            "He's not"                   _________________

            "He isn't"                     _________________

            "She is not"                _________________

            "She's not"                 _________________

            "She isn't"                   _________________

            "It is not"                      _________________

            "It isn't"                        _________________

            "It's not"                       _________________

            "We are not"               _________________

            "We're not"                 _________________

            "We aren't"                 _________________

            "They are not"            _________________

            "They're not"               _________________

            "They aren't"               _________________

 Following the homework, have your students create graphs of the results which could then be put on the classroom wall (this can work well for cross-curricular classes when English is taught in conjunction with maths, for example).

NB: The 's in 'He's not', 'She's not' and 'It's not' could also refer to the has auxiliary in present perfect structures (He's not eaten yet, etc). It may be worthwhile bringing this discrepancy to your learners' attention. They might even want to design an alternative investigative task which overcomes this little problem.

Case study 3: Why can't you say put it?

A Spanish learner once asked me this question while we were going over the results of a gap-fill exercise. I told her that the verb in question needed a preposition as well as an object. She felt sure that I was lying.

We carried out a corpus search of the verb in question and printed off the results. The task I gave my students was to look at the examples and attempt to find a single case of the verb without a preposition. Try this yourself:

Results: Prepositions or prepositional phrases are in italics.

Since we couldn't find a single case of put without a preposition, my student was forced to give in. I had successfully managed to convince her that prepositions are a grammatical requirement of this particular verb. I stressed that it can never exist without one.

We then got back to going over the results of the gap-fill exercise. I turned to one of my learners and asked, 'What did you put?'

Conclusion

• It is a bad idea to use the words never and always in conjunction with language rules.
• It can be good to demonstrate to learners that in English, the word rule can also mean describable pattern.
• A 'rule of thumb' is a principle that aims to guide rather than dictate. It is a good expression for the classroom.
• Learners can see language rules for themselves through corpora-based homework activities.