Vocabulary, collocations and ablaut reduplication (or another reason why acquiring English is difficult).

Vocabulary, collocations and ablaut reduplication (or another reason why acquiring English is difficult). When reviewing vocabulary during a speaking activity recently, one student used the phrase, “I put my fork and knife down.”  I recast the sentence saying, “So, you put down your knife and fork?”. “Yes, I put down my fork and knife.”, came the response. Why did this sound so odd to me and why was the poor student confused when I tried to explain that it’s knife and fork in English, in that order otherwise it sounds wrong? I believe a direct translation from Portuguese (garfo e faca) is partly at fault for the confusion, but English must also take some of the blame.

When reviewing vocabulary during a speaking activity recently, one student used the phrase, “I put my fork and knife down.”  I recast the sentence saying, “So, you put down your knife and fork?”. “Yes, I put down my fork and knife.”, came the response. Why did this sound so odd to me and why was the poor student confused when I tried to explain that it’s knife and fork in English, in that order otherwise it sounds wrong? I believe a direct translation from Portuguese (garfo e faca) is partly at fault for the confusion, but English must also take some of the blame. 

Collocations (or expectancy relations) 

Collocation refers to the way certain words co-occur more often than would be expected by chance, hence the term ‘expectancy relations’. This is an evolutionary aspect of a language— over time and continued use, certain combinations of words become acceptable and others not and then we come to ‘expect’ them to be used together. Examples are: 

• fun and laughter 

• climb the ladder 

• lodge a complaint 

• strong coffee 

• extremely happy 

• make a noise. 

 

This could illustrate that students could learn vocabulary more effectively in context and not as isolated words. Also because collocation refers to what would be expected, it also, in a sense, tells us what is restricted, too. The following don’t go together, unless one is playing with the language, even though the words being used are synonyms of the words previously used: 

• fun and guffawing 

• scaled the ladder 

• place a complaint 

• powerful coffee 

• highly happy 

• do a noise. 

 

When a native speaker hears ‘knife and…..’, we expect to hear the word ‘fork’. There are many words that we use in our daily language that seem alright when spoken in a particular way, but somewhat weird when said in the ‘wrong’ order. Other examples of this are when we say that a watch ‘tick tocks’ instead of “tock ticks”. Similarly, ‘flip flop’ sounds right, but ‘flop flip’ sounds wrong for some inexplicable reason. “Ping pong”, “dilly dally” and “hip hop” are a few other common examples. Even the name is “King Kong”, rather than “Kong King”, the other way just sounds upside down….

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Why is that and how can we explain it to students? There is obviously no rule that says it must be “tick tock” instead of “tock tick”, right? Right….?

Quite amazingly, there is actually a name for this phenomenon…. ablaut reduplication. Ask yourself: would you feel a little weird if someone said lightning followed a ‘zag zig’ path? Or that ants ‘cross criss’ each others’ paths all the time? I would, because all this time, I’ve been unknowingly following the rule of ablaut reduplication.

 

In linguistics, the word ‘reduplication’ is when you repeat a word, sometimes with a modified vowel (e.g., ding dang dong) or sometimes with an altered consonant (e.g., nitty-gritty). If there are two words, then the first word contains I, and the next word contains either ‘A’ or’ O’ (e.g., ‘mish mash’, ‘hip hop’, ‘chit chat’ etc.). This rule was first spotted by Mark Forsyth who explains that “If there are three words then the order has to go ‘I’, ‘A’, ‘O’. If there are two words then the first is I and the second is either ‘A’ or ‘O’.”  Every example of the English language follows this pattern.” It’s that simple…..

 

We really don’t know why this rule holds good and is followed all over the world, but it’s believed that it might have something to do with the movement of your tongue and to the physics of sound.

Consider the example of ‘hip hop’. We usually pronounce the word ‘hip’ with a higher tone than the word ‘hop’; therefore, an elevated ‘hip’ is followed by a lower-toned ‘hop’. While pronouncing the ‘O’ in ‘hop’, the tone of the word is dropped a little, which is, in turn, associated with opening your mouth more than when you pronounce ‘hip’, which is of a higher tone, and is a bit tighter than ‘hop’.

In simple words, the quickness and tightness of the ‘I’ sound in ‘hip’ make it seem like something is going to follow it, while the ‘O’ (or ‘A’) sound in ‘hop’ is more drawn, and might give the idea of a conclusion, as if the word has come to an end. So, easy to understand…or further evidence that English is weirdly fun? Anyway, time is tock-ticking away, so no more dally-dilling, I have to go and put on my flop-flips and listen to some hop-hip while playing pong-ping.