Recap on Different Varieties of English Vocabulary Usage

By Hu Wo (Cuckoo’s Song)

SO FAR as the number of global languages is concerned, I know that there is still a region of 7,000 languages living in the world. Among these languages, English is a global language which is also most spoken all over the world, we know. Of course, English came out with a basic Anglo-Saxon word stock; Viking and Norman invaders from the 9th century enriched the language enormously with a large number of words taken from their own languages often referred to as loanwords or borrowings. Like, since English has always accepted words from other languages into their lexicon easily, it is calculated that English vocabulary has its sources in at least 120 languages. As we all know, quite a lot of words in English are derived from Latin roots. Nowadays there are over a half million words in English. In that connection, English has been a language of rich vocabulary until now as well. But even an average native speaker is, to my knowledge, only able to use the order of 5,000 words in everyday speech. English learners need, therefore, to master language word skills so as to get hold of a wide and pretty vocabulary as much as they can afford.

 

Whenever a word is found anywhere, language learners should see which part of speech this word relates to, i.e., is it a noun, pronoun, determiner, adjective, verb, adverb, preposition, conjunction, or interjection? In the sentence `I am home´, the word `home´ is an adverb, not a noun. Afterwards, care should be taken to memorize the spelling and pronunciation of a word. As regards avoiding spelling mistakes, words will need to be learnt by making them in a letter cluster, for example, `B-E-A-U, T-I, F-U-L´ one group a syllable. For English pronunciation, phonetic symbols have already been formulated, for instance, /byutafal/ for the word `beautiful´. Next, diverse word forms must have been studied as far as we can remember. For example, the noun and irregular verb forms of `write´ are `writer, wrote, written, writing´. Similarly, one word may be of many meanings. This is called `vocabulary polysemy´ by linguistics. For in stance, the capitals in the phrases `capital letters´ and `the capital of New Zealand´ do not have the same meaning – the former means `big´ whereas the latter says `the city of a country´. Such this meaning difficulty might be overcome by guessing contextualized meaning and recognizing the prefix, root or suffix of a word. In the word `unconsciously´, for example, `un-´ is the prefix, `conscious´ is the root and `-ly´ is the suffix. By looking at the prefix `un-´ and the suffix `-ly´, it is easy to estimate that the word `unconsciously´ not only has a negative sense but also is an adverb.

 

As my teacher Saya Thet Zaw (Meiktila) said, anyone, will never have got a good command of English even until his death if he is learning the language word by word. I totally agree with him. There are a great number of multi-word expressions in English that should have been studied in chunks, particularly phrasal verbs, idioms, and collocations. By Oxford, phrasal verbs are a verb combined with an adverb or a preposition, or sometimes both, to give a new meaning. These adverbs and prepositions are altogether called particles of a phrasal verb. In the sentence `You will go away´, `go away´ is the phrasal verb and `away´ is the adverb. In the sentence `She could stay at a house´, `stay at´ is the phrasal verb and `at´ is the preposition. In the sentence `I look forward to your homecoming´, `look forward to´ is the phrasal verb, `forward´ is the adverb and `to´ is the preposition. So phrasal verbs are usually in three structures of word order _ verb+adverb, verb+preposition, and verb+adverb+preposition. In my experience, several learners of English tend to use `accuse for´ instead of `accuse of´ mistakenly and carelessly. Thus, the particles of a phrasal verb must be exactly retained in pairs or phrases while being committed to memory.

 

By Oxford, an idiom is a group of words whose meaning is different from the meanings of the individual words. According to this definition, it is quite apparent not to be able to tell the meaning of an idiom off the cuff at first sight. `The best way to understand an idiom is to see it in context´, Cambridge says. Moreover, idioms are mostly fixed in their form, hence getting the keywords and details right with regard to idioms becomes essential for learners indeed. And there are idioms from many varieties of English too. By way of illustration, the sentence `It’s raining heavily´ is written as `It’s raining cats and dogs´ in England, `It’s throwing cobbler’s knives´ in Ireland, `It’s raining shoemaker’s apprentices´ in Denmark, and `It’s raining old women with clubs´ in Namibia. The types of idioms include the form `verb+- object/complement and/or adverbial´ (e.g., kill two birds with one stone), prepositional phrases (e.g. in the blink of an eye), compounds (e.g. a bone of contention), similes (e.g. as dry as a bone), binomials (e.g. rough and ready), trinomials (e.g. cool, calm and collected), clauses (e.g. to cut a long story short), greetings and good wishes (e.g. Hi there!), sayings, proverbs or quotations (e.g. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.). The purposes of using idioms are to lay emphasis, to agree with a previous speaker, to comment on people or a situation, to make an anecdote more interesting, to catch the reader’s eye, to indicate membership in a particular group and so on. However, it should be remembered that idioms disappear very quickly but some last for an age.

 

Actually, phrasal verbs, id ioms, and collocations can be said to interrelate with one another. By Oxford, collocations are termed a combination of words in a language that happens very often and more frequently than would happen by chance. Depending on their usage, collocations have three kinds: strong, fixed, and weak. As Cambridge says, a strong collocation is one in which the words are very closely associated with each other, e.g., mitigating circumstances. Fixed collocations are collocations so strong that they cannot be changed in any way, e.g., to and fro. Weak collocations are made up of words that collocate with a wide range of other words, e.g., in broad agreement, a broad smile, and broad shoulders. Grammatically speaking, there may be divided into seven sorts of collocations – verb+noun (e.g., withstand pressure), noun+verb (e.g., opportunity arise), noun+- noun (e.g., a stroke of luck), adjective+noun (e.g., plain truth), adverb+adjective (e.g., stunningly attractive), verb+adverb/ prepositional phrase (e.g., drive recklessly, burst into song), and more complex collocations (e.g., put the past behind you). The reasons why it is important to learn collocations are to use the words we know more accurately, to sound natural when we speak and write, to vary our speech and writing, and to understand when a skilful writer departs from normal patterns of collocation.

 

Exceptionally, phrasal verbs have a one-word equivalent form; for example, `acquire´ is the single-word equivalent form of `pick up´. Some writers like to use idioms in order to make sentences flowery – they should be careful not to use too many, though! Also, natural collocations are not always logical or guessable. Over and above those I have discussed, there are still other remarks in the English language: synonyms (e.g., stop = cease), antonyms (e.g., urban vs rural), homophones (e.g., there, their, they’re), homographs (e.g., I `read´ in bed each night. I `read´ War and Peace last year.), vague expressions (e.g. or so), easily confused words (e.g. continuously & continually), abbreviations (e.g. NHS stands for national health service.), clippings (e.g. sci-fi is short for science fiction.), acronyms (VAT means value-added tax), metaphors (e.g. see the light), fixed statements (e.g. So far, so good.), clichés (e.g. Ignorance is bliss.), outdated words (e.g. consumption as tuberculosis /TB), US English (e.g. `rest room´ is `toilet´ in British English.), false friends (e.g. gift’s in English and German), connotation, degrees of formality (i.e. neutral, formal, or informal), language and gender.

 

There is a lot to say and study on English vocabulary usage. It is natural that learners’ memory will probably lessen as soon as they are getting aged. The learners have to grasp as many vocab ularies as they can by looking up words in monolingual, bilingual or multi-lingual dictionaries, using the Internet, and brushing up on vocabulary notebooks. In a vocabulary notebook, highlighter pens, mind maps, pictures, drawings, and stickers can be used where necessary. It is best if language learners study vocabulary at a regular time every day on end – at least 30 minutes or one hour a day. Oftentimes modern or updated words are in daily newspapers. Sayagyi Dr Htin Aung once said, `Simple English is the best´. The English that the great teacher meant is an effective and efficient one, I think. To write out effective and efficient English, learners must be able to use living words, phrasal verbs, idioms, collocations or whatever with fluency and accuracy. Almost all various fields of study have been written in English around the globe. If study fields were a lock, the English language would possibly be a key. In this connection, any linguistic learner should have owned a language key called English, anyway.

 

References:

1. English Vocabulary in Use, Pre-intermediate and Intermediate (Stuart Redman)

2. English Vocabulary in Use, Upper-intermediate (Michael McCarthy, Felicity O’Dell)

3. English Vocabulary in Use, Advanced (Michael McCarthy, Felicity O’Dell)

4. English Phrasal Verbs in Use, Advanced (Michael McCarthy, Felicity O’Dell)

5. English Idioms in Use, Intermediate (Michael McCarthy, Felicity O’Dell)

6. English Idioms in Use, Advanced (Michael McCarthy, Felicity O’Dell)

7. Teaching-Learning English as a Language (Thi-Ha)

8. English Collocations in Use, Advanced (Michael McCarthy, Felicity O’Dell)

9. Oxford Dictionary of English

10. Longman Advanced American Dictionary