|
Anna Dziemianko
User-friendliness of verb syntax in pedagogical
dictionaries of English
Lexicographica Series Maior 130
Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.
2006
229 pp.
ISBN 3-484-39130-8
During the planning stages of the second edition of the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
(LDOCE2, 1987) – the first dictionary I edited – one of the main
questions under discussion was what to do about syntax. About 15 years later,
when the Macmillan English Dictionary (MED,
2002) was at a similar stage, syntax had almost ceased to be an issue. By the
late 1990s, we were able to conclude that approaches to describing syntactic
behaviour in the various monolingual learners’ dictionaries of English (MLDs)
had reached a natural end-point: they had coalesced around a limited range of
fairly simple options, and we took the view that there was not a great deal
more to be done in this area. Having read Anna Dziemianko’s excellent book, I
am not so sure.
User-friendliness
of verb syntax in pedagogical dictionaries of English reports on a large-scale, rigorously-designed
experiment which the author conducted in order to assess the usefulness and
usability of the various systems used in MLDs for describing the syntactic
behaviour of verbs. This forms the heart of the book, but Dziemianko kicks
off with a well-researched survey of the field. She follows the trajectory of
syntax-coding systems, from the ‘verb patterns’ introduced in Palmer’s Grammar of English Words (1938) to the
(supposedly) transparent approaches of the present day, and she reviews
relevant user-research along the way.
For a long time, the choice was between two equally
arcane (and mutually incompatible) coding systems, as found in LDOCE1 (1978)
and OALD3 (1974). The descriptive power of these systems was never in doubt:
they enabled lexicographers to provide a delicate and fine-grained account of
most syntactic patterns. For this reason, they were popular in the NLP
community – I was almost lynched at a computational linguistics conference in
the US when word got out that I was ‘the man who removed the
codes from LDOCE’. But by the early 1980s, it was becoming clear that the
average dictionary user got very little benefit from these codes. This must
be what Tony Cowie had in mind when he referred – in his Introduction to a
special issue of Applied Linguistics
on pedagogical dictionaries – to “the gap that is known to exist between the
sophistication of some features of dictionary design and the user’s often
rudimentary reference skills” (Cowie 1981. 206). In his classic user-study in
the same volume, Béjoint reports that “their [the dictionaries’]
introductions are not commonly referred to, and neither are the coding
systems for syntactic patterns” (Béjoint 1981. 219). Extensive market
research at Longman similarly revealed that “although grammatical information
is sometimes sought, most users found mnemonic codes offputting and
impenetrable” (Summers 1987. F8). For the heavily-coded systems, the game was
clearly up, and we then entered a period in which the two (then three, then
four, then five) competing MLDs experimented with alternatives to OALD’s 51
‘verb patterns’ and LDOCE’s almost infinite alphanumeric combinations (like
I5, L8, and X7). The trend was towards simplification and – to a degree –
standardization, and a contemporary student who switches from one dictionary
to another no longer has to relearn an elaborate inventory of symbols and
codes.
But there have been two other big changes since the
1980s, and both have implications for descriptions of verb syntax. First,
changes in defining styles. On the one hand, ‘full-sentence definitions’
(FSDs) were introduced in COBUILD1 (1987), and have since been taken up (in
varying degrees) by the other MLDs (Rundell 2006). As Dziemianko shows, “the
left-hand part of a full-sentence definition is a reflection of the
characteristic syntactic patterns in which the verbs occur” (37). Thus the
definition of hope (“If you hope
that something is true, or if you hope for something…”) tells the reader –
without the need for codes – that the verb can be used in a that-clause or in a PP with for. On the other hand, the move away
from ‘lexicographese’ meant that even ‘traditional’ definitions now dispensed
with the brackets used (inter alia)
for showing typical objects. This entails some loss of precision with regard
to syntax. When assassinate is
defined (without brackets) as:
to murder an important or famous person,
especially for political reasons [OALD7]
it is no longer clear from the definition wording alone
whether the verb is transitive or not.
The second major change has, of course, been the arrival
of corpora. With large amounts of language data at their disposal,
lexicographers have been able to focus more systematically on what Patrick
Hanks calls “the probable not the possible” (Hanks 2001) – and this has
implications for syntax as well as for meaning and phraseology. LDOCE1 and
OALD3 aimed to give a complete account of the possible (as opposed to regularly-occurring) syntactic behaviour
of verbs, and their coding systems provided the tools for doing this. Thus at
the second meaning of suppose (‘to
believe’), LDOCE1 has no fewer than six codes, including [X1]
(=verb+object+adjective complement: they
supposed him dead) and [X9] (=verb+object+adverbial: they supposed him somewhere else). Most users of English (native
or otherwise) could get by pretty well without knowing about either of these
patterns. Yet it was common in both dictionaries for a verb entry to start by
reeling off a list of codes, with only a subset of these actually illustrated
by examples – for the very good reason that the non-illustrated patterns were
(like these for suppose) almost
never used in normal discourse. So the trend away from opaque coding entails
not only simplification, but some loss of information too – albeit a loss
that most of us would not mourn.
A key theme, then, as Dziemianko observes, is this
tension between complete and accurate description on the one hand, and
user-friendliness on the other: “the ease of accessibility is difficult to
reconcile with the accuracy of description” (5). (An interesting question is
whether or not this amounts to a fundamental incompatibility.) She mentions
the familiar case of verbs whose surface pattern is verb+noun/pronoun+to-infinitive, and notes the technical
distinction between We want you to
leave (where ‘you’ is a direct object) and We advise you to leave (where it is an indirect object): they
look identical, but the underlying differences emerge when you try a passive
transformation. Older coding systems could (and did) account for this
distinction, but contemporary MLDs tend to stick to surface grammar. This is
an issue that no doubt has resonance in the more bracing academic climate of
Dziemianko’s native Poland, but I suspect it would mean very little to the average
UK-educated teacher of EFL. At any rate, the author – rightly, I think – concludes
that this development “should be assessed positively” (16). Dziemianko’s
admirably thorough opening chapter takes us through all these developments
and sets the scene for her research project.
In Chapter 2, Dziemianko describes the design of her
experiment and the thinking behind it. In brief, she identifies a number of
variables that affect the usability of the syntactic information supplied in
MLDs. These are:
§
definition
style: the choice here is between what she calls ‘analytical’ and
‘contextual’ definitions (or, if you prefer, conventional definitions and
FSDs);
§
type
of explicit syntactic information: ‘formal’ codes (such as Vn), ‘functional’
codes (like T+obj+to-inf), and ‘pattern illustrations’ or ‘PIs’ (like want sb to do sth);
§
location
of codes: these can appear either in the entry’s example text (where a code
or PI precedes an example that instantiates it) or outside the entry in an
‘Extra Column’.
Dziemianko creates 10 different mini-dictionaries, each
of which contains entries for the same 15 verbs, with every entry in a given
dictionary exhibiting the same combination of the variables described above.
This minimizes variation among the 10 different versions, to ensure that the
effects of each variable can be individually assessed (70). The 15 verbs used
in the study are all of low frequency (and therefore unlikely to be familiar
to the testees), and cover a range of syntactic behaviours from the simple
(like haemorrhage) to the complex
(like jolt, yank, and subpoena). The dictionary entries are
designed to look as ‘real’ as possible, and they assemble material from a
range of MLDs in various permutations, including definitions, example
sentences, IPA pronunciations, part-of-speech labels, and of course the
various forms of syntactic code. Following a cleverly-designed pre-test,
subjects complete a multiple-choice test relating to each of the 15 verb
entries in their mini-dictionary. Additionally, they are asked to underline
any part (or parts) of the entry in which they located the information they
needed to perform the test. Two large groups of subjects took the test: about
300 high school students and a similar number of students from Dziemianko’s
own university in Poznan. This adds the further dimension of language
proficiency, so any differences in dictionary-use strategies between these
two cohorts can also be observed.
This is at best a cursory overview of a meticulously
planned piece of research, which (to my knowledge, anyway) is on a larger scale,
and covers a wider range of variables, than anything attempted so far in this
area. What is so impressive here is Dziemianko’s terrier-like determination
to identify any non-relevant factors that might vitiate her results, and then
make appropriate adjustments to minimize the risk. I’m not qualified to
comment on the soundness of her statistical methods (described in some detail
on pp72-82), but by the time I got to this point I had seen enough to take
this section on trust.
3. Findings and implications
The immense care taken over the design of the experiment
pays off handsomely in the breadth and depth of the data it delivers. A short
review can’t do justice to the 50-odd pages of analysis in Chapter 3, in
which numerous hypotheses are tested against the experiment’s results, so a
few highlights will have to do. In no particular order:
§
subjects
with higher language proficiency were much more likely to get their syntactic
information from multiple sources
of information within the entry, whereas the high-school students tended to
focus on just one or two entry components;
§
examples
were the favourite source of syntactic information in most cases,
particularly among the high-school students;
§
definitions
were in general the least favoured source of syntactic information, but contextual definitions (or FSDs) were
resorted to more often than analytical ones;
§
the
positioning of codes (whether in a side column or in the body of the entry)
did not seem to make much difference to the frequency with which they were
consulted;
§
where
codes were used, functional codes – perhaps surprisingly – were preferred to
formal ones. For the university students especially, coded syntactic
information was still quite frequently used (and successfully, on the whole);
§
but
pattern illustrations (PIs) were generally preferred to codes of either type.
They were consulted “much more frequently …than any codes in entries with
analytical definitions, and even than codes and contextual definitions taken
together in the others” (154). Where PIs appear in the entry, the resort to
examples is sharply reduced (152). And (somewhat counterintuitively) PIs were
used more often by university students than by the less proficient
high-school students.
Where does this leave us? Dziemianko concludes (188)
that “as far as syntactic information is concerned, a user-friendly verb
entry should contain examples, a contextual definition [FSD] and functional
codes interspersed among examples”. But she concedes that the jury is out on
“those conclusions which pertain to codes and pattern illustrations”. In most
respects, this looks like sensible advice. As far as the use of contextual
definitions goes, my own view (Rundell 2006) is that these work best when the
syntax is straightforward and there is a dominant syntactic preference – thus
verbs typically used reflexively, intransitively, or with a simple PP tend to
fit this model well. But the format is less successful with verbs whose
syntactic behaviour shows a range of equally valid possibilities. In cases like
this, you either have to commit to just one of several structures (thus
apparently downgrading other possibilities), or to create a cumbersome
definition that attempts to account for them all.
4. Some concluding remarks
Most writers who have carried out research in this area
have ended with a plea for more teaching of dictionary skills, and Dziemianko
is no exception (190-191). This is understandable enough – it is obviously
frustrating if users are unaware of, or unable to use, all the riches their dictionaries
provide. Desirable though this may be, I suspect it is not the answer. For
the generation now using MLDs (typically, people in the age range 16-24),
complete transparency is the default expectation. The iPod comes with almost
no instructions – you just have to figure it out, and most people under 30
have no problem with this. So it is incumbent on designers of dictionaries to
create systems that users don’t have to learn
and that don’t require elaborate explanatory material.
On the other hand electronic media open up new
opportunities. Users could choose from several levels and several types of
syntactic information to suit their individual needs, skills, and preferences
– from the minimal to the complex, from pattern illustrations to descriptively
powerful codes. We also need to think about the many areas of grammar which none of the current systems deals with
adequately. MLDs are still relatively superficial when it comes to explaining
issues such as whether a complement or pattern is optional or obligatory; in
what circumstances the object of a transitive verb can safely be omitted;
whether an obligatory adverbial (for verbs like put) has an endless range of exponents; and so on. To give a
single example: you can prevent someone
leaving or prevent someone from
leaving: the from appears to be
optional – but it isn’t optional when the verb is passivized. This is hardly
an obscure fact of grammar, but you won’t find it in any of the current MLDs.
Colligation, too – the preferences some verbs have for appearing in the
passive or in a progressive form or infinitive, for example – is at best
covered patchily. The description of syntactic behaviour is far from
complete, and better ways of presenting that description can still be
discovered.
Dziemianko’s research (even if this was not the primary
intention) makes a strong case for dictionary designers to revisit the area
of syntactic description, and provides a great deal of valuable data to
inform this debate. The book isn’t always an easy read, and Dziemianko
occasionally gets bogged down in debates that aren’t strictly relevant: for
example, there is a lengthy discussion (22-28) on the relative merits of
‘made-up’ versus ‘real’ examples – which doesn’t add much to Dziemianko’s
argument, and is a rather overblown topic anyway. One might question, too,
how far her subjects are typical of the whole community of MLD users. Her
university cohort had an average of ten years’ English instruction, and had
attended courses in linguistics and English grammar – which must put them at
the higher end of the skills spectrum. One other minor complaint: it was a
little surprising to find no index , though perhaps that’s more of a problem
for a reviewer than for a ‘normal’ reader. But these are very small
blemishes. This is an exemplary study and a valuable contribution to the body
of user-research.
References
Béjoint H.
1981. The foreign student’s use of monolingual English dictionaries, Applied Linguistics II.3. 207-222.
Cowie A.P.
1981. Introduction to special issue on pedagogical dictionaries, Applied Linguistics II.3.
Hanks P. 2001.
The probable and the possible: lexicography in the age of the Internet, in
Sangsup Lee (ed.) Asialex 2001 Proceedings. Seoul: Yonsei University.1-15 .
Rundell M.
2006. More than one way to skin a
cat: why full-sentence definitions have not been universally adopted, in Elisa
Corino, Carla Marello, Cristina Onesti (eds.) Proceedings of the XII
Euralex International Congress, 2006. Torino:
Edizioni dell’Orso. 323-338.
Summers D.
1987. Introduction to LDOCE2. Harlow:
Longman.
Michael Rundell
Lexicography Masterclass
michael.rundell@lexmasterclass.com
|