15.433, Review: Lexicography/Applied Ling: Rudzka-Ostyn (2003)

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LINGUIST List:  Vol-15-433. Mon Feb 2 2004. ISSN: 1068-4875.

Subject: 15.433, Review: Lexicography/Applied Ling: Rudzka-Ostyn (2003)

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1)
Date:  Mon, 2 Feb 2004 13:41:12 -0500 (EST)
From:  Marcus Callies <callies at wisc.edu>
Subject:  Word Power: Phrasal Verbs and Compounds

-------------------------------- Message 1 -------------------------------

Date:  Mon, 2 Feb 2004 13:41:12 -0500 (EST)
From:  Marcus Callies <callies at wisc.edu>
Subject:  Word Power: Phrasal Verbs and Compounds

Rudzka-Ostyn, Brygida (2003) Word Power: Phrasal Verbs and Compounds,
A Cognitive Approach, Mouton de Gruyter, Planet Communication --
Mouton Textbook, edited by Paul Ostyn.

Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/14/14-1725.html


Marcus Callies, Department of English, Philipps-Universität Marburg,
Germany & University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA.

OVERVIEW

Contrary to what the title may suggest, ''Word Power: Phrasal Verbs
and Compounds, A Cognitive Approach'' is not a book on cognitive
linguistics, but ''a textbook for guided self-learning intended for
post-intermediate and advanced learners of English'', containing
''some 1,100 phrasal verbs and compounds used with 17 particles and/or
prepositions which combine with some 500 different verbs, nouns and
adjectives'' (p. v). The book aims ''to help more advanced grown-up
learners to rapidly and significantly expand their lexicon'' (p. v)
and is to be used for preliminary individual work by the student
outside the classroom, as well as for teacher-student and student
group-work in class.

The book opens with a short introductory chapter titled ''Words and
the World'' which describes the syntactic and semantic properties of
phrasal verbs. It also briefly explains the fundamental underlying
principles of language such as categorization and conceptualization,
and points out the metaphorical nature of language in general
(conceptual mapping using conceptual metaphors) and of phrasal verbs
in particular: ''English phrasal verbs, especially by the metaphorical
use of the particle, enable us to conceive of several abstract domains
in terms of concrete domains'' (p.7). In order to visualize the
spatial and extended metaphorical meanings of phrasal verbs, the book
uses abstract drawings that are supposed to serve as schemata,
i.e. mental representations of the underlying spatial orientation of
the respective particle. The design of the schemata is based on two
core notions borrowed from cognitive semantics to explain the human
perception of the world: ''we unconsciously foreground or focus on a
(moving) entity and view it against a background seen as container or
surface'' (p. 9), subsequently termed ''trajector'' and ''landmark'',
respectively.

The phrasal verbs and compounds covered in this book are grouped and
organized around 17 different particles/ prepositions, each
particle/preposition being treated in an individual chapter. The
chapter titles are intended to capture the underlying spatial
orientation of each particle: OUT is leaving a container, IN is
entering or being inside a container, INTO is entering a container, UP
is positive verticality, DOWN is negative verticality, OFF is breaking
contact, AWAY is disappearing, ON is contact, OVER is higher than and
close to, BACK is returning, ABOUT is dispersion, (A)ROUND is
vicinity, ABOUT/(A)ROUND is dispersion vs. circular motion, ACROSS is
motion to opposite side, THROUGH is crossing a container, BY is
vicinity or path, ALONG is parallel path or entity.

Each chapter is introduced by some basic information as to the
frequency of use, the lexical category and the meanings of the
respective particle. The chapters are then divided into smaller
subsections which focus on different aspects of meaning, such as
chapter 1 ''OUT is leaving a container'', which contains the
subsections

1.1 OUT: entities moving out of container
1.2 OUT: eat or inviting to eat away from home
1.3 OUT: sets, groups are containers
1.4 OUT: bodies, minds, mouths are viewed as containers
1.5 OUT: states/situations are containers
1.6 OUT: non-existence, ignorance, invisibility also function as
         containers
1.7 OUT: trajectors increasing to maximal boundaries

These subsections are in turn introduced by the abstract drawings
mentioned above and mainly consist of sets of so-called ''exetests''
(a blend of ''exercise'' and ''test''), sometimes supplemented by
short explanatory text passages. These exetests are fill-in-the-blank
exercises, comprising a number of individual sentences in which
students have to provide a missing phrasal element. There are three
ways to access the missing phrase: (i) the lexical material to be used
to fill in the blanks is alphabetically arranged on top of each
exetest, (ii) the initial letter of each missing element is indicated
to the right of each exercise sentence, and (iii) there is a solution
key to the exercises at the end of each chapter. Furthermore,
supposedly less frequently used words that occur in the exercise
sentences are glossed at the end of each exetest, allowing the teacher
to use the book in very heterogeneous classes. Most chapters also
include a section called ''Expand and test your knowledge of X'' and
consist of a variety of exercises in some of which students are asked
to explain or paraphrase the meanings of selected (pairs of) phrasal
verbs in their own words.

CRITICAL EVALUATION

Phrasal verbs are notoriously difficult for learners of a foreign
language, since they are widely believed to be arbitrary in that their
meanings usually cannot be identified by combining the meanings of the
constituent parts. However, research in cognitive linguistics has
shown that not only metaphorical expressions 'proper', e.g. phrases
such as ''a hot debate'' or ''to invest time'', but also idioms,
phrasal verbs and possibly more varied figurative expressions are in
fact metaphorically motivated (e.g. Gibbs 1990, Gibbs and O'Brien
1990, Kövecses and Szábo96), and can be traced back to a common
underlying metaphoric theme or source domain. Additionally, lexical
research has uncovered that there is a systematicity underlying the
formation of many phrasal verbs (see Sansome 2000 for a discussion and
practical suggestions how this insight is relevant for foreign
language teaching).

The last decade has seen a number of publications that recognize the
importance of figurative language in foreign language learning and
teaching, and suggest the integration of metaphorically motivated
language in particular into ESL/EFL teaching as a means to expand
students' vocabulary, or to provide an additional channel for
vocabulary acquisition (Lazar 1996; Deignan, Gabrys and Solska 1997;
Boers 2000; Beissner 2002). Studies in applied linguistics have shown
that the lexical organization of vocabulary along metaphoric themes
can raise foreign language learners' metaphor awareness, thus
enhancing the understanding and retention of unfamiliar figurative
expressions (e.g.  Boers 2000).

This book successfully combines the findings of cognitive and applied
linguistics and implements them into ESL/EFL teaching material. The
phrasal verbs and compounds are grouped around each particle, thereby
revealing their underlying spatial orientation and metaphorical
motivation. This organizational principle is designed to raise
metaphor awareness on the side of the student, and at the same time
uncovers the figurative network of seemingly unrelated lexical items
by using the underlying metaphoric themes as a type of alternative
lexical field (cf. Boers 2000: 553). Additionally, and despite the
very short introductory chapter, the book manages to capture the basic
information needed to understand the cognitive approach, and it
explains well how the figurative senses of the particles are extended
from its spatial senses through conceptual metaphors(pp. 2-5).

Having said that, I'd like to make some suggestions which may help to
improve the book still further. Given that the book is explicitly
intended for self-study and gives only very little information on the
linguistic background, it seems desirable to include at least some
basic literature and suggestions for further reading, such as the
classic text, but also more recent introductory works on the
contemporary theory of metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson 1980 and e.g.
Kövecses 2002). However, a reference list or further reading section
is missing.

The author quite heavily draws on frequency information throughout the
text, e.g. ''less frequently used words'' (p. v, vii) or ''OFF is
after UP and OUT the third most frequently used particle'' (p. 121),
but nowhere in the book is there any reference as to where this
information is taken from, be it from recent corpus studies, modern
corpus-based dictionaries such as the Longman Dictionary of
Contemporary English, or the author's own observations and
findings. This lack of references makes it impossible to verify the
frequency information given in the text. Neither is there an index to
all the phrasal verbs covered in the book.

The major point of criticism, however, relates to the make-up of the
exercises. Despite the fact that the preface acknowledges that
''learners fix new words or new meanings in a foreign language best []
if they are embedded in contexts'' (p. v), the exetests actually
consist of isolated and unrelated sentences which are not embedded in
surrounding co(n)-text, thus not sufficiently
contextualized. Moreover, as was mentioned above, the majority of
exercises (except for the ''Expand and test your knowledge of X''
sections which feature different kinds of vocabulary exercises) are
basically fill-in-the? blank sentences, and students are likely to get
bored with them. The use of more varied vocabulary activities and
appropriately contextualized real-life material such as
advertisements, newspaper clippings, sayings, or even poems (cf. Lazar
2003) would certainly help to make the exercise sections more lively
and increase students' motivation for self-study. In fact, although
the book is designed for post- intermediate and advanced students of
English, the nature of the exercises, and the fact that the missing
elements can be figured out all too easily, makes it more suitable for
intermediate than advanced learners (for potentially more advanced and
challenging exercises see the suggestions made by Boers 2000 and
Beissner 2002).

Nevertheless, the book is a welcome and long-awaited contribution to
the field of EFL/ESL teaching. It successfully applies the findings of
cognitive linguistics to foreign language teaching and is probably one
of the first of its kind in that it explicitly adopts a cognitive
semantic approach in a pedagogical context for the presentation and
teaching of phrasal verbs (see Lindstromberg 1996 and Boers and
Demecheleer 1998 for a similar approach to the teaching of
prepositions).

REFERENCES

Beissner, Kirsten (2002), I see what you mean ? Metaphorische Konzepte
in der (fremdsprachlichen) Bedeutungskonstruktion. Frankfurt/Main:
Peter Lang.

Boers, Frank (2000), ''Metaphor Awareness and Vocabulary Retention'',
Applied Linguistics 21:4, 553-571.

Boers, Frank and Murielle Demecheleer (1998), ''A cognitive semantic
approach to teaching prepositions'', ELT Journal 52:3, 197-204.

Deignan, Alice, Gabrys, Danuta, and Agnieszka Solska (1997),
''Teaching English metaphors using cross- linguistic awareness-raising
activities'', ELT Journal 51:4, 352-360.

Gibbs, Raymond W. (1990), ''Psycholinguistic Studies on the Conceptual
Basis of Idiomaticity'', Cognitive Linguistics, 1:4, 417-451.

Gibbs, Raymond W. and O'Brien, Jennifer E. (1990), ''Idioms and Mental
Imagery: The Metaphorical Motivation for Idiomatic Meaning'',
Cognition, 36:1, 35-68.

Kövecses, Zoltan (2002), Metaphor. A Practical Introduction. Oxford:
OUP.

Kövecses, Zoltan and Szabó, Peter (1996), ''Idioms: A View from
Cognitive Semantics'', Applied Linguistics 17:3, 326- 355.

Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson (1980), Metaphors We Live By. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.

Lazar, Gilian (1996), ''Using figurative language to expand students'
vocabulary'', ELT Journal 50:1, 43-51.

Lazar, Gilian (2003), Meanings and Metaphors. Activities to Practise
Figurative Language. Cambridge: CUP.

Lindstromberg, Seth (1996), ''Prepositions: meaning and method'', ELT
Journal 50:3, 225-236.

Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. With New Words Supplement
(2001). München: Langenscheidt-Longman.

Sansome, Rosemary (2000), ''Applying lexical research to the teaching
of phrasal verbs'', IRAL 38:1, 59?69.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Marcus Callies is a doctoral candidate in English Linguistics at
Philipps-University Marburg, Germany and currently a Visiting Research
Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research interests
include Contrastive Linguistics (German-English), Second Language
Acquisition (with a focus on discourse-functional aspects of learner
language and interlanguage pragmatics) and cross-cultural metaphor.


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