Lexical layers 2: connotation

In my last post, I talked about the importance of delving beyond the surface meaning of new vocabulary to try and help learners understand where and when it's appropriate to use a particular word or phrase. I looked at the concepts of register and genre, and how certain words are more typical of particular contexts and stand out as odd (or 'marked') when they're used elsewhere.

A couple of the comments on that post questioned how teachers can find time to cover all this extra information when there's already so much else to fit in. To which my first reaction is perhaps that quality is as important as quantity – there's no point memorizing a whole load of words if you don't know how to use them appropriately! But also, I realized that it's easy when you focus on a specific aspect of learning for it to get blown out of proportion. While I'm saying that understanding beyond the surface of meaning of vocab is really important, I'm not saying that learners and teachers need to go into all this detail with all the words they come across and certainly not all at the same time. Lots of words are fairly neutral and uncontroversial, so it may only be the odd word or phrase here and there that comes with a 'health warning' and needs some extra explanation. And those layers may be peeled back gradually with repeated exposures, adding in a note about register or other kinds of usage as vocab starts to shift from learners' passive to active vocab (pointing out a new aspect of a word is a great way to make revision seem less repetitive). Nonetheless, for those words which are marked in some way, exploring those extra layers can be really key to vocab development.

In this post, the layer I want to explore is connotation or the feeling and attitude of the speaker that particular word choices convey. Take a look at these words and phrases that all refer to a person who's physically larger than normal – what images do they conjure up, who could you apply them to and how would they feel about it?

Adjectives like these tend to be at the more obvious end of the connotation scale, but all kinds of words reveal something about the user and their attitude towards the person or thing they're talking about. To take an example in the news fairly recently, would you describe a person at a climate strike event like the one below as an activist, a campaigner, a protestor, a demonstrator, an agitator, a militant or maybe a troublemaker or even an uncooperative crusty*? 

All these words have slightly different connotations, both in and of themselves, and also depending on who they're used by and applied to. The learner who looks up the equivalent in their L1 on Google translate and randomly picks one of the options they're offered could find themselves getting across a very different message from the one they intended. Incidentally, I looked up activist on Google translate and, ignoring the translations, it offers the English synonyms militant, zealot, protestor, radical, extremist and netroots … the last of which I'd never heard before but apparently comes from a blend of grassroots and internet to describe campaigners who communicate their message online (check out definitions here and here)  … which is a neat word, but clearly has layers of meaning (not to mention lexicogrammar) that you'd need to decode before using it.

Teachers and learners often love the idea of a thesaurus to help expand their vocabulary, but as the example above illustrates, it's a path fraught with danger. Many of the thesaurus tools available online are aimed at L1 speakers of English who are looking for inspiration. It's assumed they'll be familiar with most of the synonyms that crop up and have some idea when it's appropriate (or not) to use them. They are not designed for learners of English and even if they link through to definitions, they'll likely again be written for L1 speakers in a style that won't be of much help to the average learner. Many learner's dictionaries also have thesaurus facilities of some kind, often in the form of clickable synonyms at the bottom of an entry. These can be more helpful, in part, because they're likely to focus on more useful, high-frequency words rather than the often obscure results of L1 tools. What's really important though is that learners understand the importance of clicking through to the definitions to check how the synonym may differ in usage from their starting point. Learner's dictionaries often show connotation through labels such as disapproving or offensive or humorous. Alternatively, these restrictions may be incorporated into the definition itself, e.g. "used to describe someone you disapprove of …".  Or subtler differences may be shown through the choice of examples. I suspect, however, many learners skim over these important caveats, focusing only on the basic meaning (or denotation). Which is why work in class on noticing and understanding the significance of this kind of information is so important.

Of course, though, dictionaries and other reference sources can only give very general guidance on typical usage. People all use and understand language differently. If you're female, for example, how do you feel about people referring to you as a woman, a lady, a girl or a bird? Does it depend on who they are? Have your feelings, like mine, shifted slightly over time? Whether or not you perceive a particular word or expression as formal, informal, slang, old-fashioned, offensive, condescending, complimentary, humorous, appropriate or inappropriate will come down to your social, cultural, regional, educational and professional background, your age, your gender and potentially a whole host of other factors … which I'll talk about in my next post.  

* uncooperative crusties was an expression used by UK Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, to describe people at a climate strike event in London in Oct 2019 (link to BBC news report here)

Succeed in doing the opposite

A while back I wrote about a corpus search throwing up slightly unexpected findings for the chunk 'crowded market'. Yesterday, I was researching some vocabulary around the theme of success and again, came across some more slightly unexpected uses.

The first thing I noticed was how many of the words I'd picked out to talk about success were commonly used in the negative to talk about lack of success.

He hasn't had any luck finding a job.
She tried ... without much success. 
Your application has not been successful.

I wonder if it's a way of being slightly less blunt about failure. Are we softening the blow a little by saying someone didn't succeed rather than admitting they failed?

What struck me even more though was the common use of the chunk succeed in -ing where the following verb describes a negative; often the exact opposite of the intended result:

He tries to turn the lamp off, but only succeeds in knocking it over.
He only succeeds in digging himself into a deeper hole.
... succeeded in alienating hispanic voters.*

It turns out that the usage, especially preceeded by only or just, is frequent enough to merit a subentry in the Macmillan dictionary:

Needless to say, it succeeded in sidetracking me from what I was meant to be doing and proved no use at all for what I was writing, but I'll store it away somewhere for future reference ...

* Examples from the enTenTen corpus via SketchEngine

Unexpected corpus findings

I use a corpus all the time when I’m writing – to check how a word’s typically used, its strongest collocates or just to look for inspiration for example sentences. And most of the time, what comes up is more-or-less what I’d expect. Sometimes there’s a collocation I hadn’t thought of, but it’s rarely very surprising. Just occasionally though I’m a bit taken aback by what the corpus reveals …

This week, I was working on some simple vocab practice activities (for B1 level) and I was looking for examples to illustrate the adjective crowded. So I did a quick corpus search to see which nouns it typically modifies. I wasn’t surprised to find:

crowded + street, market, room, area, place, train, etc.

Crowded market seemed like a nice prototypical context which would be easy for most learners to visualize, so I clicked through to browse some examples. In scrolling through the cites, I came across two slightly surprising trends:

The metaphorical: a large chunk of the examples were for the metaphorical, business sense of a market, rather than the physical place with stalls selling goods. I found lots of companies struggling to compete in an already crowded market for energy or cars or whatever. It reminded me that all too often we forget about the very common metaphorical uses of words and chunks in English, assuming that because the learner recognizes the basic, often concrete meaning of an item, they’ll automatically pick up on a metaphorical usage too.

The sad reflection: the other flurry of uses was more of a sad reflection of the world we live in (and the news media who report it), with lots of examples of bombs going off in the middle of crowded markets. It made me wonder about the connotations in different cultures attached to things we tend to view and present as neutral and harmless.