Patterns that go unnoticed

It’s turning into a bit of a negative end to the year … not because of anything bad happening, just because I find myself deep in a flurry of words beginning with un-. In my last post, I looked at what I’ve now discovered is called litotes; the use of two negatives together to express either irony or a subtle distinction between two absolutes (not uncommon, not unpleasant, etc.). Recently, I’ve been seeing another pattern with un- prefixed words; a kind of passive construction with go + un- + past participle:

 

It seems to describe events that no one sees or does anything about, things that are missed or ignored. In terms of form, it’s a bit like the get passive that we’re all familiar with, but this time the focus is on the lack of an agent doing anything. Although like most passives, we can add a by to say who didn’t notice or act … and maybe should have.

It’s also another pattern that can be used with a negative – back to litotes again. This seems to work in two ways – to talk about negative actions and events which won’t escape notice or shouldn't escape punishment:

But also to talk about positive actions and events that will be acknowledged or rewarded:

 

Digging a bit deeper, I realized that as well as the obvious negative verbs beginning with un-, the pattern also occurs with a handful of other verbs that have a negative meaning:

Flicking through the ELT grammar reference books on my shelves, it seems to go unmentioned. If you dig deep enough, it does feature in many dictionary definitions for go, like these from Cambridge and Macmillan, but I'm guessing it's the kind of entry that goes largely unread ...

Cambridge Dictionary

Macmillan Dictionary

Not such an uncommon pattern

I was recently researching the word unproblematic. Before I started looking at the corpus evidence, I expected that it was used to describe something that’s simple, straightforward, and uncontroversial, something that doesn’t throw up any problems. And it is, but …

As I scrolled down the concordance lines, sorting left and right as I often do when I first look at a word, I noticed a chunk of not unproblematic examples. It was a significant, but not huge proportion, so I made a mental note to investigate further when I’d dealt with the more obvious examples. As I started to look in more detail, it soon became clear that those straightforward examples, although they were there – The whole process was simple and unproblematic – were actually in the minority. What I did find was:

not unproblematic

However, the category of 'climate refugees' is not unproblematic.
However, comparing evidence from different surveys is not unproblematic.
This definition is not unproblematic, as it seems to rest on circular reasoning.
However, this approach is not unproblematic, since site reactions can cause distress to patients …

not an unproblematic + noun

Given related debates this is not an unproblematic option either.
Of course, Twitter is not an unproblematic representation of the population.
However, this is not an unproblematic undertaking.

not + (a/an) + adverb + unproblematic

balancing school and extracurricular activities is not always unproblematic
So student visas are not completely unproblematic from this point of view.
it's not an entirely unproblematic development from an editorial standpoint
The study was, indeed not wholly unproblematic
I also concluded that the idea is not so unproblematic as it might appear on first glance.
This popular mixed-mode design is not altogether unproblematic from a measurement error perspective

Miscellaneous other negatives

However, the process has not been unproblematic and has led to controversies
there can be cases where the merger cannot be characterised as unproblematic in advance.
The situation should not be thought of as unproblematic, though
That doesn't make it unproblematic
Princess Jellyfish isn't what you'd call unproblematic, but I really enjoy most of it so far

[All examples from English Web 2020 (enTenTen20) corpus via SketchEngine]

What all of these examples seem to have in common is the idea that something isn’t as simple as you might expect or as it might seem, and that in fact there may be some problems with it.

Delving further into other un- words that come after negatives, I found lots of similar patterns. Here are some of the most frequent combinations:

 

Although they don’t all work in exactly the same way and you come across different nuances of meaning in different combinations or specific examples, there does seem to be a common generalizable meaning. What many of the not + un- patterns seem to be trying to convey is:

• a middle ground between the two antonyms – where something isn’t very problematic, common, expected, etc. but neither is it straightforward, rare, unexpected. Where that point along a scale between the two lies varies depends on context, although my feeling is it’s usually nearer to the un-

 

• often the idea that something is not quite what you might expect or what it might seem. It may seem unproblematic, uncommon, unexpected, but maybe it’s not quite as much as you’d think.

And of course negatives aren’t limited to un- words – not dissimilar springs to mind – so I’m sure there’s more here to explore.

This all raises the question: have you ever seen this pattern taught, even at advanced levels? I don’t think I’ve seen it, at least not explicitly highlighted. Given it’s clearly not altogether uncommon, it’s certainly been added to my ongoing list of features to get a mention next time I’m writing something relevant.

 

And for those who're interested:

 

Are you hyphen-hesitant?

At a recent webinar on EAP vocab, the topic of prefixes had come up and someone asked me the best way to teach students about when to hyphenate words with prefixes.

My first answer – which I wasn’t quick enough to give at the time – is I’d tell them to really not worry about it!

My second answer – and the one which I gave – is if they’re not sure, check in a dictionary. Although, to be honest, good luck with that …

Recently, I’ve been spending a lot of my time researching prefixed words and one of the things I’ve been checking is which are typically hyphenated and which are closed (no hyphen). And the results are really messy. It seems that a corpus search for almost any prefixed word will throw up a mix of both options.

Dictionaries: Dictionaries seem to vary a bit in their approach to showing prefixed words. Most though show the most frequent spelling as the headword, then the other alternative as a variant.

 

Although of course, different dictionaries use different corpora and will come up with different balances of hyphenated/closed examples. So, if you look up the same word in several dictionaries, don’t be surprised if you find different answers.

Some trends: Although it’s an area where there aren’t firm rules, there are a few tendencies:

Fixedness: Typically, newly created prefixed words tend to start off with a hyphen – perhaps to make the original root word clearer and the novelty less confusing. Then over time, as the combination becomes more familiar and fixed, the hyphen often gets dropped – think e-mail > email, on-line > online.

US vs UK: Also as a general rule of thumb, Brits tend to use more hyphens than Americans.

Double vowels: Where a prefix ends in a vowel and the root word starts with a vowel, hyphens are more common to avoid possible confusion over the pronunciation of the double vowel sound. So, co-opt is quite clearly /kəʊˈɒpt/ (two separate O sounds) whereas coopt not only looks a bit weird, but could potentially be pronounced /kuːpt/!

Looking at a few random corpus examples of prefixed words with double vowels, it’s clear that there are a mix of factors in play. The mispronouncability of the closed compound may be one – try antiageing without a hyphen. And some more familiar, fixed combinations, like preempt and preamble, are less likely to be hyphenated compared with more novel ones that err towards a hyphen – semiindependent is clearly a step too far for most people!

Note: All my corpus stats here are very rough and ready – this isn’t a careful academic analysis – but I think they probably represent the general trends. With this kind of thing, you also need to bear in mind all kinds of different factors, like the influence of style guides – so, for example, a major publisher or media group might decide at a certain point to shift from using e-mail to email and that could have quite an impact on corpus stats. As ever, language gets pushed and pulled by all kinds of sometimes mysterious forces!

Post-lockdown Coronavocab: pre-booking & walk-ups

This sign outside a local museum recently caught my eye because it contains interesting examples of two word types I’ve been working with lately; prefixes (pre-booked) and phrasal verbs/derived nouns (walk-ups). They also seem to reflect something of the new normal, in the UK at least, at the moment.

Pre-booked

This is one for the pedants out there! Because, of course, if you book something, you reserve it or buy your ticket in advance. So, what then is pre-booking? The pre- seems like a somewhat unnecessary prefix. And the difference between booking and pre-booking does seem to be a subtle one. Pre-booking simply emphasizes how far in advance you book. It can describe a situation where you can reserve something before it’s officially available to buy. It can just signify the need to book something well ahead rather than leaving it to the last minute and potentially losing out. And in this case, it emphasizes the idea that people need to book their tickets, probably online, ahead of arriving at the venue to avoid crowds of people queuing up.

Until quite recently, in the UK, almost anywhere you visited - a museum, exhibition, garden, restaurant and even most train tickets – had to be booked in advance and typically for a specific time slot in order to help venues to control the number of customers and avoid crowds of people. According to Merriam-Webster, prebook was first used back in 1855, but there does seem to be evidence that it’s seen a spike in usage in the past year (not sure what the spike in 2014 was down to).

Walk-ups

As regulations relax here, however, more places are starting to accept walk-ups; customers who arrive on the day without a booking.

Interestingly, this sense of walk-up doesn’t seem to feature in most dictionaries. Most list the US sense to refer to a multi-floor building without a lift/elevator where you literally have to walk up the stairs. M-W also has a sense “designed to allow pedestrians to be served without entering a building” as in a walk-up coffee counter, also a common feature of pandemic life where anything designed to keep people outdoors has flourished.

The walk-up counter at a local coffee shop

Corpus data shows that the ‘customer arriving on spec’ sense has been around for a while, although the inverted commas around the first example perhaps hint at the term’s origins as trade jargon rather than common everyday usage:

There has very clearly though been a significant jump in usage, which I suspect is less about this being a new term than the fact that, in a time of changing rules and norms, we have more need to differentiate between customers who pre-book and those who arrive on spec, and more clarity over what’s possible. [Note the stats here are for all senses of walk-up.]

Interestingly, the 2020-21 data shows lots of walk-up Covid testing sites, but also starts to hint at the opening-up of other venues to casual custom.

Walk-ins

And just when I thought this post was ready to go, I headed out for a walk to take photos of a couple of local walk-up coffee counters and … 1 I found one of my favourite coffee shops has moved its counter indoors – another sign of changing times, but still great coffee – 2 I came across several signs for walk-ins … So, I scurried back to my corpus to check it out.

A sign outside a local bar

 

And in the window of a barbers

Again, this is polysemous with its most common use as an adjective to describe large storage spaces – walk-in wardrobes/closets/freezers. I also found several dictionary entries for both the adjective and noun forms to refer to (places that accept) customers who arrive without a booking – most labelled as (mainly) US. The corpus data I looked at for walk-in suggested a more even US/UK/other split than for walk-up (which was quite US-heavy) and it also showed an upward trend in 2020 (again for all uses), although slightly less pronounced.

 

I don’t know about you, but it was the final example above that really typified my recent experience of either not going out because it’s too much of a nuisance to get a booking or of shivering outside in a not-very-summery British summer!

10 ways to tackle coronavocab: #3 The Science

Lots of scientific and medical terms that you’d probably never come across before are suddenly being bandied about on the news. We’ve all learnt the difference between an epidemic and a pandemic and have got used to hearing about PPE, the R rate and co-morbidities.

Again, if you want to tackle this angle in class, choose words to look at that are appropriate for the level of your students. Many of these will be most relevant to more advanced levels, CLIL or EAP. Also think about whether the specific items are useful for your students to actively learn and revise … probably not unless they're medical students! These terms will more likely be most useful for prompting discussion or for exploring transferrable language points (such as prefixes).

 Activities:

• Because many of these terms are new to fluent English speakers too, there are plenty of good explainers around in text, audio and video form that could be used with students as reading and listening input to prompt discussion. Try some of these:
• Simple short BBC videos explaining epidemic v pandemic or the R number
• BBC Bitesize – a simple glossary of coronavirus terms aimed at school children 
• A short text from the Guardian explaining epidemic v pandemic
• A Guardian podcast about R-0 and herd immunity - this is quite a long podcast with some blurb at the start that you'll want to skip, but potentially useful with a more advanced/EAP class
• This is another great vocab set for exploring prefixes: epidemic v pandemic, co-morbidities, antibody, etc. These types of prefixes are especially useful for EAP or CLIL students who are likely to come across similar formations across disciplines. Suggest words that use the same prefixes from other academic disciplines (or challenge students to find them from their own subject areas) to create prefix posters or mindmaps.

• a- is an especially interesting prefix in English (meaning 'without') – start off with asymptomatic and maybe anosmia or asynchronous (which will come up in a later post about teaching and learning) and broaden out to other common uses of the prefix (asymmetrical, atypical, etc.) Either give students the words to work out the meanings or get them to find words with the prefix for themselves in the dictionary. Elicit contexts for the pairs of opposites - describe a situation that's typical and one that's atypical, an object that's symmetrical and one that's asymmetrical.
• With many of these long, multi-syllable words, it's worth spending a bit of time on pronunciation, of individual sounds (like the a- prefix always /eɪ/ and never a weak form) and of stressed syllables.

 

Hint: Most learner’s dictionaries have entries for prefixes which give both the meaning and a few examples, look at a- here or co- here.

 

Many learner's dictionaries are keeping up with pandemic-related vocabulary by adding new entries to their online dictionaries, including many of the items featured in this series. Take a look at Oxford Learner's Dictionaries list of new additions for May 2020, for example. And for more ideas for vocab activities generally take a look at ETpedia Vocabulary.