LECTURE I. WORD POWER (VOCABULARY STUDY)

 

1. INTRODUCTION TO WORD POWER (WP)

2. WORDS ON WORDS

3. EVALUATE YOUR WORD KNOWLEDGE

 

INTRODUCTION TO WORD POWER (WP)

WP is about words and word knowledge

It has been estimated by some researchers (Nagy and Herman, 1984)* that a native speaker of English who has completed 12 years of school encounters approximately 88,500 distinct word families with upwards of 100,000 distinct meanings in reading in English. According to Nagy and Herman, if materials for higher grades and for adults were included, then these figures would be substantially higher. In their view, the best way to acquire this necessary vocabulary is by reading, reading and more reading! While it may be an unrealistic goal to expect to acquire all the words one needs within the frame­work of one course or even two, it is possible to improve one's word acquisition strategies and one's knowledge of and about words. This is the purpose of this unit.

«Limitations of Vocabulary Instruction» Technical Report No. 326 Center for the Study of Reading University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

 

Which words you learn is up to you. You, the learner, have to build your own personalized vocabulary based on what you feel is important to you. The information and exercises in­cluded in the WP unit, along with the texts you read in the EFL course and the readings in English on the bibliographies for your other courses, will increase your English vocabulary. We hope all this will also improve your word knowledge (i.e. what you know about how words are formed and how to figure out what new words probably mean). Ultimately, we hope it will give you a feeling of word power (WP).

 

WORDS ON WORDS

(Some Thoughts About How, and What, Words «Mean»)

Text A. (from Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll «Humpty Dumpty» — Chapter VI)

«When I use a word,» Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, «it means just what I choose it to mean — nei­ther more nor less .»

«The question is,» said Alice, «whether you can make words 5 mean so many different things.»

«The question is,» said Humpty Dumpty, «which is to be master — that's all.»

Alice was too much puzzled to say anything; so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. «... I can manage the 10 whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That's what I say!»

«Would you tell me, please,» said Alice, «what that means?» «... I meant by "impenetrability" that we've had enough of that subject, and it would be just as well if you'd mention what you mean to do next, as I suppose you don't mean to stop here 15 all the rest of your life.»

«That's a great deal to make one word mean,» Alice said in a thoughtful tone.

«When I make a word do a lot of work like that,» said Humpty Dumpty, «I always pay it extra.»

Text B. (from Lewis Carroll's Symbolic Logic, quoted on p.269 of The Annotated Alice, ed. Martin Gardner)

...I maintain that any writer of a book is fully authorized in attaching any meaning he likes to any word or phrase he intends to use. If I find an author saying, at the beginning of his book, «Let it be understood that by the word "black" I shall always mean "white", and that by the word "white" I shall always mean "black,"» I meekly accept this ruling, however injudicious I may think it.

Text C. (from «The Philosopher's Alice in Wonderland,» by Roger W. Holmes, in the Antioch Review, Summer, 1959, also quoted in The Annotated Alice fp.2701)

«May we ... make our words mean what we choose them to mean? One thinks of a Soviet delegate using "democracy" in a U.N. debate. May we «pay our words extra,» or is this the stuff that propaganda is made of? Do we have an obligation to past usage? In one sense words are our masters, or communi­cation would be impossible. In another we are the masters; otherwise there could be no poetry.»

Text D. (from «Words,on Words,» the acceptance speech de­livered by Vaclav Havel, on receiving the Peace Prize of the German Booksellers Association on October 15,1989; reprinted in «The New York Review of Books,» January 18, 1990)

(1) Words can have histories too.

(2) There was a time, for instance, when, for whole genera­tions of the downtrodden and oppressed, the word socialism was a mesmerizing synonym for a just world, a time when, for the ideal expressed in that word, people were capable of sacri­ficing years and years of their lives, and their very lives even. I don't know about your country, but in mine, that particular word — «socialism» — was transformed long ago into just an ordinary truncheon used by certain cynical, parvenu bureauc rats to bludgeon their liberal-minded fellow citizens from morning until night, labeling them «enemies of socialism» and «antisocialism forces.» It's a fact: in my country, for ages now, that word has been no more than an incantation that should be avoided if one does not wish to appear suspect.

 (3) I was recently at an entirely spontaneous demonstration ...protesting the sell-off of one of the most beautiful parts of Prague to some Australian millionaires. When one of the speak­ers there, loudly decrying the project, sought to bolster his appeal to the government by declaring that he was fighting for his home in the name of socialism, the crowd started to laugh. Not because they had anything against a just social order, but quite simply because they heard a word which has been in-canted for years and years in every possible and impossible context by a regime that only knows how to manipulate and humiliate people.

(4) What a weird fate can befall certain words! At one mo­ment in history, courageous, liberal-minded people can be thrown into prison because a particular word means something to them, and at another moment, people of the selfsame variety can be thrown into prison because that word has ceased to mean anything to them, because it has changed from a symbol of a better world into the mumbo jumbo of a doltish dictator.

(5) No word — at least not in the rather metaphorical sense I am employing the word «word» here — comprises only the meaning assigned to it by an etymological dictionary. The mean­ing of every word also reflects the person who utters it, the situation in which it is uttered, and the reason for its utterance. The selfsame word can, at one moment, radiate great hopes, at another, it can emit lethal rays. The selfsame word can be true at one moment and false the next, at one moment illuminat­ing, at another, deceptive. On one occasion it can open up glorious horizons, on another, it can lay down the tracks to an entire archipelago of concentration camps. The selfsame word can at one time be the cornerstone of peace, while at another, machine-gun fire resounds in its every syllable.

(6) Gorbachev wants to save socialism through the market economy and free speech, while Li Peng protects socialism by massacring students, and Ceausescu by bulldozing his people. What does that word actually mean on the lips of the one and 50 the lips of the other two? What is this mysterious thing — [«socialism»] — that is being rescued in such disparate ways?

 

Text E.

Exercises:

I . In text (C) above, Roger W. Holmes asks: «May we... make our words mean what we choose them to mean?»

1. How does Holmes himself answer this?

2. Compare Holmes' position on this issue with that of Lewis Carroll (in text В above). Which of the two do you find more persuasive?

3. Why do you suppose Lewis Carroll qualified what he said by adding at the end of his declaration, «however injudicious I may think it»? (What did he realize might turn out to be «in­judicious»?)

4. How do you imagine Vaclav Havel (in text D) might answer the same question?

5. How does the girl in the peanuts cartoon answer it?

6. What words that have «histories» (see the first sentence of Havel's speech) can you think of?

II. A. Carroll tells us (in text В above) that if a writer wants to use a word to mean something different from what it com­monly means, he need only tell us, at the beginning of his text, what special meaning he has assigned to that word in his text. But what if a writer does not prepare his reader in this way? By what other means can we guess what meaning he has assigned to a word that he has used in an unusual way (one that cannot be found in any dictionary?)

1. One possibility is illustrated in the short Text (Part III) called «Filters Against Folly.» The writer speaks of a «shortage of supply and a longage of demand» (1.4). The tech­nical term for the rhetorical device used here by this writer is «parallelism.» What do you think «parallelism» means? How do we know what he means by longage, even though the word does not appear in any dictionary?

2. We can also guess something about the meaning of a word by its position in the sentence, or by its ending. This can be helpful in understanding something about what a writer is telling us, even when we're not familiar with many of the words he uses.

a. To understand something about the meaning of a word by its position in the sentence, we have to know the parts of speech (noun, verb, adjective, adverb, etc.)-and how they function in an English sentence.

For example:

— The first word in a sentence will usually never be a verb. But an unfamiliar word that follows one of the familiar modals (can, may, must, would, etc.) probably is a verb (e.g. , He may abscond with the money) , though the modal may be followed by an adverb (e.g. , He may never abscond with the money). -An unfamiliar word following any of the determiners (i.e., the articles «the», «a», «an», «some», «any»: the possessive pronouns such as «my», «your», etc. ; the demonstratives «this», «that», «these», and «those»; and the counters or mea­suring words such as «few», «many», «several», etc.)-is probably a noun of some sort (e.g. , Behold the Aardvark ingesting termites). -A word ending in «ly» is likely to be an adverb (e.g. , He is demonstrably idiotic), fol­lowed by an adjective; though it could also be an adjec­tive (e.g., He was a friendly creature) , followed by a noun. For the meaning of grammatically significant word endings such as «ly», see «Suffixes Used to Form Parts of Speech» in the Appendix to Part I (WP).

II. B. Below are a set of sentences with nonsense words. In the blanks provided, replace each nonsense word with some meaningful word, so that the resulting sentence is well-formed and meaningful. Use your knowledge of the meaning aspects of word forms and their functions in English.

1. The clonks were wimbling pootishly.                                                                                                      

The_______ were______ ing______ ly.

2 . Have you beller spiggled a _____?

Have you______er______ ed a _____?

3. This om the bodgiest puckle in the Hitch.

This______the ____iest ______in the ___ .

4. Greezzy fubbles should blably be shifted.

____ у______s should _____ly be _____ ed.

5. You can skritch your Cripples and plutch them into your trinks . You can____________ your_______s

and_____them into your______s .

What clues did you use to decide what parts of speech to choose to fill in the blanks?

II. C. In his novel, The Clockwise Orange, Anthony Burgess created a special lexicon (i.e., a list of words with their meanings) for his characters. To be understood, he depended upon his readers' background knowledge of the criminal world (presumably acquired second-hand, from reading and seeing «thrillers»). But he also depended upon their knowledge of the forms and functions of words in ordinary English.

What sense can you make of the following passage taken from The Clockwork Orange?

Then we slooshied the sirens and knew the millicents were coming with pooshkas pushing out of the police auto-windows at the ready. That little weepy devotchka had told them there being a box for calling the rozzes not too far behind the Muni Power Plant.

 

EVALUATE YOUR WORD KNOWLEDGE

How large is your English vocabulary? Do you need to have precise knowledge of every word in order to be able to under­stand a text? Is it sometimes enough to have only a vague idea about some of the words? Is it sometimes all right to ignore a difficult word, hoping you will be able to figure out what it means after further reading?

1. Evaluate your word knowledge (decontextualized). The following words come from Sublist 1 of A University Word List, prepared by Xue Guo-yi and Paul Nation, reprinted in Language and Communication, 3(2), 1984).

How well do you know each of them? (place the appropri­ate symbol before each word.)

i. 0 = no knowledge,

ii. ? = some knowledge,

iii. + = knowledge (discriminating knowledge, i.e. you can translate it, can give a definition, can understand it fully in reading and can use it productively in writing.)

alternative arbitrary assume concept constant criterion denote dimension element equivalent evident guarantee ignore imply interpret method negative presume publish range restrict specify suffice tense valid

analyse assess compensate conclude construct data derive distinct environment establish facilitate hypothesis illustrate indicate involve minimum obvious prime pursue region role status summary ultimate vary

approach assign complex consist context define devise dominate equate evaluate formula identify impact initial magnitude modify potential proceed random require similar subsequent technique usage vertical

 

 

2. Underline ten difficult words in one of the texts in this book as you read it, and before you reach for a dictionary.

A. How important is it for you to know each of these words in order to understand the text? (Evaluate the importance on a scale of 1-5: (O) = of no importance; (5) — crucial)

B. How important is it for you to know these words for your general/personal vocabulary? (Evaluate the im­portance on a score of 1-5: (О) — of no importance; (5) = crucial)

3. Strategies available for learning and remembering a new word:

1. Internal context (analysing word structure — prefixbase — suffix)

2. Association of the new word with words that look the same (i.e., have the same base, or stem)

3. External context (studying the words, phrase or sentence(s) just preceding or just following the unfamil­iar word)

4. Aural and/or visual cues (associating the word with some sound or image)

5. Native language equivalents (associating the word with its equivalent in your native language)

6. Synonyms (associating the word with word(s) of similar meaning )

7. Antonyms (associating the word with word(s) of opposite or contrastive meaning)

8. Collocations (associating the word with words that go together with it, i.e. coffee or tea)

9. Placing the word within a semantic field — (groups of words used in relation to a given topic or scene)