Naturalness is to text what grammatical correctness is to sentences\': a corpus-driven perspective

“Naturalness is to text what grammatical correctness is to sentences”1 a corpus-driven perspective Amanda C. Murphy Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milano

0. Excessive consideration of grammatical correctness This paper addresses an issue that in my experience of working with non-native teachers of English in Italy is often left by the wayside2. Sometimes it is unnoticed, but mostly it is not perceived to be of great importance. The problem is that of grammatically correct (or well-formed) but unnatural-sounding English. My aim here is simply to argue that grammatical correctness is still given excessive priority by many teachers today, and that high-quality teaching needs to centre around natural-sounding language, with particular attention to lexical patterning. Obviously, no teacher would actively theorise that linguistic naturalness should be ignored; nevertheless, their choices of activities for students, and their marking of student texts reveal possibly unconscious priorities, where grammar has pride of place. If a coherent theoretical position esteeming naturalsounding language is convincingly set out, and a more heuristic approach to language learning is accepted, and if intelligently-crafted instruments can be seen to help enact this view of language learning, then, perhaps, grammar will return to its rightful place in the chorus, alongside – rather than blocking out - lexical patterning.

1. Non-natural language

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Sinclair, J.M.,1991, Corpus, Concordance, Collocation, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

2

Part of my interest in this topic lies in personal experience of the fact that you can lose naturalness in your own language. Living abroad in a foreign language, and communicating in English mostly with native speakers in the same boat, or with non-native speakers, has resulted in my case in a certain, probably temporary, loss of naturalness. Undoubtedly, this depends to some extent on one’s involvement in, assimilation of and identification with the foreign culture. In any case, the issue does not only concern non-native speakers.

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To clear a little terminological ground, I wish to quote scholars who illustrate how I am using the word naturalness applied to language3. In Sinclair’s Corpus, Concordance and Collocation he claims (my italics): “If we accept that the requirements of coherence and communicative effectiveness shape a text in many subtle ways, the term naturalness is simply a cover term for the constraints that determine the precise relationship of any fragment of text with the surrounding text.” 4 In the 1988 monograph Naturalness in Language5, Sinclair had identified these constraints at sentence level as three variables: allowables, rangefinders and supporters. All three are ways in which words in a sentence recall or are dependent on other parts of the text, like a pronoun that requires a referent elsewhere, a past tense of a verb which needs some kind of past time indication, or one word which normally occurs with another (collocation or colligation). In this view, the naturalness of a single sentence can be assessed according to the presence or absence of these variables, which make it sit comfortably (or perch uneasily) in the surrounding text. Owen (1988) clarifies the point that non-naturalness is not a question of faulty syntactic or semantic structure, nor is it a lack of pragmatics in terms of links with the context.”6 It is language that is not typical and which jars on the ear of a native “natural” speaker7. Examples of non-natural language may simply not fit in with native-speaker expectations (as with lexical mis-selection) or they may be informationally or lexically too dense8. McCarthy’s identification of preferred sequences9 in the same volume is also directly relevant here. From the books of well-known theoretical linguists he takes a series of invented example sentences, one such being “Lee strikes Sandy as being naïve about politics”, and shows that their “ring of 3

For a critical overview of the uses of the word natural applied to language, cf. G Porcelli and R. Dolci 1999:12. Sinclair, J. op.cit. p. 6 5 cf. M. McCarthy (ed.) Naturalness in Language, Birmingham, University of Birmingham, ELR Monograph. 6 Owen, C. 1998. “Naturalness and the Language Learner” in M. McCarthy (ed.), Naturalness in Language, Birmingham: The University of Birmingham ELR Monograph. 7 The relationship between creativity and typicality is an intriguing one, particularly within the field of corpus linguistics. Can a creative collocation, for example, be natural, even though it is untypical? 8 Carter (1998:92) gives a simple formula for calculating lexical density: 100 multiplied by the number of lexical words divided by the total number of words in text. He quotes Ure (1971) who has calculated that generally speaking more than 40% of the words in a written text are lexical, as opposed to less than 40% in spoken texts. 4

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Cf. McCarthy, M. 1988.

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artificiality”10 stems from the fact that although the string of words is syntactically perfect and collocationally faultless, the sentence does not sound natural, because at least one of the features in the sentence does not normally occur with the verb strike. (The meaning of normally, of course, could be contested, but McCarthy’s linguistic conviction is based on a corpus linguistics approach, and on the observable evidence of occurrences of strike from a section of the Birmingham corpus of English language, the Bank of English (BoE).11) He reports that out of 125 attested occurrences of the present tense of strike in the BoE, all of which mean “to impress itself on the mind”, 109 of them occur with a personal pronoun, especially me, and none of them occur with the combination X (subject) strikes Y. McCarthy himself admits, “such data can never be exhaustive, but it makes the very clear point that there are preferred sequences and that these sequences are finely balanced combinations of lexico-syntax.”12 In sum, languages have internally preferred ways of arranging words, or restrictions on combinations of words, and stretches of language that flow smoothly respect these preferences or restrictions. The two points I wish to follow up are that : a) naturalness is a property of a language, rather than a property of the user (and therefore can be tapped into, examined, and learnt, in so far as a language can be learnt); b) naturalness is a property of the way language is used in texts.

2. Definitions of text Etymology is not always a help in understanding the meanings and usage of words: think of the different directions in which history has led commotion and commozione – both derive from the Latin commotio but the English now refers exclusively to hustle and bustle, while the Italian refers to an inner emotional state. However, in the case in point, that of text, the Latin texere – to weave

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Cf. G. Francis (1993 :138) For a clear and perceptive outline of the use of corpora in Applied linguistics, see Hunston, S. 2002, Corpora in Applied Linguistics, Cambridge, CUP. 12 Cf. M. McCarthy 1988:55. 11

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provides an enlightening image. Two different but complementary views on text come from the Anglo-Saxon and the European traditions: Halliday and Hasan define text as “any passage, spoken or written, of whatever length, that does form a unified whole […] A text is a unit of language in use. It is not a grammatical unit, like a clause or a sentence; and it is not defined by its size. […] A text is best regarded as a semantic unit: a unit not of form but of meaning.” (Halliday and Hasan 1976:1) Rigotti’s definition is less structural and more philosophical: a text is the succession of two or more sequences […] In order to have a text, the succession itself must carry meaning, unitary meaning. A text has meaning if it produces a change in the listener’s way of being. (Rigotti 1997:215 My translation) Both definitions are enriched by knowledge of the word’s etymology: text is undoubtedly a combination of factors, like different threads; it cannot be reduced to a mere sequence of sentences. The common feature in the above definitions is that of being a unit of meaning, and a unit of language in use13. That implies a whole series of things: meaning happens, is exchanged or created through texts, which are formed by links between words, links between those who communicate, links between message and context. Naturalness, however, is a property of the language in use, not so much a link with the extra-linguistic context. In order to get at it, though, we must use texts, ie. whole units of meaning. As teachers, we need to ensure that students are exposed to texts, that they are helped to notice the features of texts, and are asked to produce texts.

3. Examples of student homework Having established that if teachers want to teach meaningful, natural-sounding language, and it is texts that they must start from, it would seem useful to examine some aspects of real student output and imagine ways in which a teacher could appropriately and effectively tackle the problem of nonnaturalness in them.

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I take it for granted in Rigotti’s definition that if a text produces a change in a listener it is language in use.

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The following excerpts were part of a writing task given to 25 students in the third year of a liceo artistico in Milan. These students are expected to be able to be able to talk and write about painting in English. The first task was to describe a painting that was reproduced on the paper, and the second was to answer a question on the British painter Constable. a) Describe this painting This is Calais Pier, with French poissards preparing for sea: an English packet arriving, painted by Turner in 1803. In the foreground in the right corner I can see a ruin of ship, and the poissards on it. In the middle of the painting there is the sea agitated with many waves and some ships with poissards that seem afraid. b) Why was Constable revolutionary in the Romantic Age? Because his technique was the same as a scientist’s one, we can say that Constable is nearer to realism because of his deep observation and great capacity in analyse the natural elements of a landscape. He is also independent on the academic art and the patrons’ tradition because he said that painting was a scientist.

4. Comments on the student texts Ignoring anything strictly grammatical for the purpose of this paper, I will concentrate on elements that I would consider to be non-natural, and on steps that the teacher can take if faced with a piece of homework such as this. While certain lexical mis-selections are obvious (the student must think the French word poissards is English14), there is no doubt that s/he has used some appropriate artistic or technical terminology, such as foreground, right corner, technique, realism, landscape. But it did not surprise me to learn that the student had not been exposed to many descriptions of paintings before, because there is no logical sequencing of elements in the description. The same linguistic structures “in the + spatial indicator” are repeated (in the foreground, in the corner, in the middle) but there is no clear reason for the order of the information, and it certainly does not read naturally. The last sentence “In the middle of the painting there is the sea agitated with many waves and some ships with poissards that seem afraid.”

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Moreover, it is not clear what the student meant even in French. I presume there were sailors on the ships, even though poissard is an adjective meaning vulgar and a poissarde is a fish-wife in the figurative sense.

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is an example of unnaturalness because it is “not textually dependent enough”, i.e. it does not appear to be part of the preceding text: it could be a sentence in isolation. There are no references backwards – “of the painting” in the expression “in the middle of the painting” is completely redundant: obviously we are talking about a painting, and this is only the third sentence since the beginning. But the student appears to have little sense of writing a text that is a combination of endophoric and exophoric links – even though s/he is referring to a reality that the reader can see. The observation in the last sentence that the poissards seem afraid is an example of how s/he would be capable of making the painting come alive in words, if shown how to. As it is, the “paragraph” ends lamely, without any sense of conclusion. The first observation to be made is that this student has probably not had enough exposure to texts with a similar aim (describing a painting) and therefore has little experience to draw on. Output is always related to input, and the poorer the input the more paltry the output. The logical step would be either to give students the task to find such texts, or find them yourself.

5. Building your own specialised corpus With a little time, collecting specialised material of most types is relatively easy via the world wide web. For the purpose of this paper, I did a web search for sites on painting and signed up for a free 24-hour subscription to Grove’s Dictionary of Art and the Encyclopaedia Britannica. I then downloaded and saved articles on Constable and his paintings, sifting them fairly carefully before saving them. It is a truism to say that in a case like this, being a native or non-native speaker is irrelevant. English for Art is a specialised area, and unless one already has a specific interest in it one undoubtedly has to do a considerable amount of preparation in order to find appropriate and well-written material. However, if I were teaching English in a liceo artistico, I would certainly

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devote time to collecting as many texts as possible, given the dearth of teaching material on the market15.

6. A text archive or a corpus? Before proceeding with the analysis of non-natural aspects of the students’ texts, I would just like to clarify briefly the reasoning behind making a corpus of specialised texts. There is nothing new about large quantities of specialised texts: libraries or archives have divided up their material by subject area for centuries and tried to make them accessible to an interested public. But the point of any corpus is that it is designed for a specifically linguistic purpose and is stored in machine-readable form and accessed via specifically designed software. It contains no new information about language, but, as Hunston puts it, “the software offers a new perspective on the familiar”16. It is the processing of the texts by the software (usually a concordancer) that brings to light patterns in the language that can be observed. So building a corpus of texts about paintings should enable the teacher to discover patterns within the language of art which s/he may not have not noticed before. It is those patterns which are part of the constraints in text that Sinclair speaks of, and which help create the natural feeling to a text. Those patterns can be revealed if the corpus is intelligently “mined”.

6. Mis-collocations and a few remedies There are two pairs of words in the quoted student texts which irritate the ear rather than tickle it pleasantly. If this irritation were merely subjective, it would not be what Owen (1988) terms a linguistically interesting question, and it would be impossible to investigate in any scientific way. However, an investigation in the small corpus I created17 and in various tools and dictionaries, proved that these words are not normally mutually attractive.

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For further reading on corpora and genre studies, cf Bhatia Hunston, S. op. cit. 17 The question of the size of a corpus, and of its representativeness of a language, is a moot, unresolved point. Cf. de Beaugrande in Ghadessy et al. 2002. 16

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To go back to the student texts, I have underlined the words that I have no trouble understanding, but which just do not sound right. a)

In the middle of the painting there is the sea agitated with many waves and some ships with poissards that seem afraid. b) Constable is nearer to realism because of his deep observation and great capacity in analyse the natural elements of a landscape.

The problem with these sections is that, though unmistakable in their meaning, the words simply do not collocate18. While a native speaker may notice exactly where the problem lies, s/he will probably not know how to solve it. In any case, there are several negotiable paths that can be taken towards the solution. To demonstrate this, I looked more carefully into the words sea, agitat*, deep and observ* by using the following six instruments: 1) Collins Cobuild English Dictionary 2) Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners 3) BBI Dictionary of English Word Combinations 4) Cobuild English Collocations on CD-ROM 5) Cobuild Direct, the Online version of the BOE which searches 50 million words from the BOE 6) My mini art-corpus

I will present only the most interesting and useable results of this search, but first wish to say why I went down the above paths. To start with the two monolingual dictionaries for learners of English, they are both corpus-based; this means that the examples and explanations given are attested examples of real language. Having established that natural language occurs in naturally occurring text, it would seem counter-productive to use dictionaries with invented examples. These two dictionaries both indicate the frequency of occurrence of the lemmas they list, and give separate

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Michael Lewis defines collocation as the “readily observable phenomenon whereby certain words co-occur in natural text with greater than random frequencies.” (1997:12)

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entries for the different forms of lemmas which have different meanings. This is important because, as the data from this research shows, the different forms of a lemma (e.g. observe and observation) while theoretically sharing the same meanings, may tend to be used much more in one sense rather than in another. In the Cobuild dictionary, examples of observation include Careful observation of the movement of the planets or She has good powers of observation. This is interesting but is not directly applicable to solving the problem of whether deep can collocate with observation, or indeed whether observation is used to talk about painters and nature. The BBI Dictionary of Word Collocations is an alphabetical list of “essential word combinations” with many examples of words that collocate but few explanations of when to use them. Thus looking up observation, one can find that it can refer to a comment, the condition of being observed, or the act of observing. There is no indication of which use occurs more frequently, as there is in the Cobuild and Macmillan dictionaries. The noun observation is said to collocate with the adjectives empirical or scientific as adjectives, and the verb to observe with the adverbs attentively, carefully, closely. Since there are no indications of the contexts in which these would be used, the information is of limited use to a foreign learner. At this point, to shield myself from criticisms of obsession (or encourage the flagging reader) it is appropriate to quote Implementing the Lexical Approach: “Teachers need confidence that time spent on a single word is not wasted, providing the words given this extended treatment have been carefully selected.” (Lewis 1997:113) The fact of the matter is that when faced with a text which does not appear to read fluently, if it is possible to identify combinations of words or phrases that seem to sound unnatural, it is only access to many texts where the same word is used that can give evidence for a marker’s gut reaction. And in this sense, the fourth and fifth instruments on the list are the most productive. The Collins English Collocations on CD-ROM is a collection of the 140,000 most frequent collocations drawn from a 200 million word selection from the Bank of English. To access these collocations, you type in the word (the node) whose lexical (or grammatical) patterning interests you and it produces a list 9

of the most common 20 collocates with that word. Clicking on any of these collocates then gives you 20 of the 2, 600, 000 examples on the disk. Below are the twenty most common collocates with the adjective deep with the number of occurrences found in 200 million words. It will be seen immediately that none of them refer to sight or even insight. On close examination, most of them are to do with a physical depth (breath, water, sea, fried, end), a increased sense of distance (down, inside, within,) or with strengthening of intensity (blue, red). On this evidence, it would seem that deep is not used, at least very commonly, to indicate a way of looking.

Fig. 1 Collocates with deep from the Collins Cobuild Collocations on CD-ROM.

Breath

768

Down

644

Water

621

Very

487

Took

438

Fried

437

Sea

374

Inside

362

Blue

361

Seated

333

Take

319

End

298

Within

287

Recession

282

Too

279

10

Feet

278

Rooted

277

Cuts

269

Voice

269

Red

261

To be doubly sure that deep observation is not a common expression, I then accessed the Cobuild Direct, the free online service which dips into 56 million words from the Bank of English and allows you to search for combinations of words. I typed deep observation into the query line on the concordances page, and no examples emerged. That is, in the section of the bank of English that is available through this service19, there were no examples of these two words together. I then tried observ* by itself, in order to find some suitable collocates. Out of the 40 randomly selected lines of observation, none were from the field of art. Significant collocates were mass, keen, careful, early, close and direct. It seemed to me that careful or close observation might be the nearest in meaning to what the student had wanted to say with deep, so I then called up examples of careful observation on the CD-Rom. What follows is a selection of those lines:

Fig. 2 Concordance lines of careful + observation from Collins English Collocations on CDROM Y It took four years of careful observation and a complex network of electron te and that this deserves careful observation and follow-up, which we are now p earch was stimulated by careful observation and a strong sense of inquiry. Ro pirical science based on careful observation and the deduction of causal expla volves a lot of listening, careful observation and caring. But it is an investme

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25% of the texts are American, 5% come from other native English speakers (e.g. Australian, Singaporean) and the rest is British English. Two thirds of the texts come from the media (newspapers, magazines, radio and TV), but fiction, non-fiction, brochures, leaflets, letters and reports are also included.

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None of the examples concerned art, and the noun appears to be used more in medical or scientific contexts. Interestingly, in the examples, the noun is always followed by and. Close observation also appeared in more or less the same contexts, although there was one example with the word nature: Fig. 3 Concordance of observ* in mini-art corpus (sorted 1 left) 170mph. He remained under close observation in a Bologna hospital last night. last night being kept under close observation in a Pounds 275-a-night private w imagination. They come from close observation of how very little children repea n views arose directly from close observation of nature and careful experimenta achieved? Quite simply by a close observation of dynamic markings, an occasiona often denied close and intensive observation of small-group work on school exp ermit such a continuous and close observation of the young. The growth pattern

The last investigation on the question of observation was to look up observ* in the mini-art corpus. All the texts in the corpus talk exclusively about art, which is admittedly an under-represented genre in the BoE. The following 5 examples emerged:

Fig. 4. Concordance of observ* in mini-art corpus (sorted 1 left)

4.

1.

nhope Forbes, produced some brilliantly observed studies of the local fishing

2.

des but also painted a number of finely observed views of the Thames, which

3.

ndicating an attempt to reconcile these observed data with what he knew of ex

e sleek cows graze and elegant horsemen observe contented milkmaids and herdsmen 5.

al activities that the aristocrat could observe with satisfaction. The

What is interesting here is that observation as a noun is not present at all, as in the BoE, whereas there are 2 modified adjectives – brilliantly/finely observed which clearly refer to the artist. This is a tiny finding, (the mini-corpus is tiny too - 10,800 tokens), but it indicates that observed as an adjectival past-participle of the verb can be appropriately, naturally, used in writing about art. If I were teaching how to write about painting in art, this would be an important path to follow up. First 12

of all by looking at the text surrounding the word of interest, since a concordance line is merely part of a text under a microscope. The difference in use between observed and observation also recalls what was said earlier about different forms of the same lemma having different patterns of meaning.

7. A brief look at agitated, sea and waves Regarding the natural use of agitated, sea and waves, I made similar searches to the above, and reproduced below are some of the significant findings. Brief comments preface each figure.

Fig. 6 Concordance lines from Cobuild Direct. Search word: agitated Here it emerges that agitated does not occur in any watery context. Individuals become, sound, or seem agitated. their request for credit. Tommy is agitated and annoyed. `Come on, come on, NHS Trust. `We found it helped what's the matter? You seem very action, and I've never seen him so about paranoid feelings" in a less I must say, he did sound rather watch television." [p] He became so his money with him The sound of the the house was in a very excited and

agitated and aggressive people become agitated." [p] You're absolutely certain noagitated or passionate." [p] [h] Learning agitated person would usually be expressed agitated." She laid a piece of paper on my agitated, twitching his face and beginning agitated voices brought her out of her agitated state [h] Breaking point;John

Fig. 7 Concordance lines from Cobuild Direct. Search word: agitation. As a noun form, agitation appears to occurs largely as a word describing behaviour in political contexts. on fire in the continuing become disrupted. This leads to events. As the fundamentalist wretchedness, giving rise to social acted out before my eyes. The

agitation agitation agitation agitation agitation

against the government policy to and behaviour which is often mounted in Iran, the Shah may and eradication cults and Europe' and heated exchanges of the

Fig. 8 Occurrences of sea in the mini-art corpus. If a sea does not commonly get agitated, what does it get? Here only choppy occurs. e paintings were variously described as e but the dramatic response of a choppy many followers. Samuel Scott depicted ialized in panoramic vistas of the open

'sea-pieces', 'seascapes', 'marines' and sea to a turbulent sky. Landscapes of sea battles in the manner of the van de sea were John Brett and Henry Moore (183

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ng boats, yachts and vistas of the open style of Joseph Vernet; he also painted ly adept at painting the surface of the antic movement in England turned to the ssional marine artists who recorded the any of the most vivid portrayals of the successful life to the portrayal of the ntings'. The most popular subjects were

sea. (ii) Britain. The van de Veldes e sea battles, the most impressive being h sea and the weather-beaten timbers of je sea as a source of inspiration. Philippe sea battles and shipyards of the later 1 sea have been painted by artists with li sea in all its moods. The Shipwreck (180 sea battles, harbours, shipwrecks and es

Fig. 9 A common collocate of waves: huge. Waves proved to be a more fruitful search. High, huge and tidal all appeared as common collocates, with violence (so-called agitation) appearing in intensive verbs occurring within a few words of the collocation. when his parents vanished into huge waves as their boat sank. He scrambled in ital. Hurricane-force winds and huge waves battered the grounded oil tanker in arry the sea over the defences, huge waves driven by howling winds hammered the able as any we've spent at sea. Huge waves from an even more serious storm to o -The region was devastated by huge waves generated by an earthquake - A plane seen being tossed about by the huge waves - Here in East London, some members 0 mile per hour winds and huge tidal waves in the southern part of the country RESCUE Rescuers are battling huge waves in the South China Sea to try to sav to go to emergency shelters as huge waves lashed the coastline. `We are taking . Even in the 1950s, before the huge waves of forced removals from `white - are e Indus in southern Punjab, and huge waves of water are expected to reach there around like tiny matchboxes as huge waves pounded into the bay - Torrential ra d and 12 people were rescued as huge waves pounded the New South Wales coast rrible feeling of riding on--on huge waves, that one minute you're up and OK an

Conclusions The conclusions that can be drawn from the above lead in many directions. The desire to make a text sound more natural led to a zooming in on individual problematic words, while scrutinizing the contexts and forms in which they occurred led outwards again to other words and concepts with which they are linked, even though the links cannot always be described. This suggests that a) teachers need to want to know the contexts in which words naturally occur; this implies greater attention to collocation and the use of tools such as the CD-ROM described; b) being able to access vast quantities of naturally occurring data means that intuitions can be verified against hard data. The integration of corpus linguistics techniques in language

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pedagogy is an ever-increasing phenomenon, and is becoming more and more accessible both in terms of availability and theoretical justifications20. c) In McCarthy’s words (1988:55) “Naturalness not only resides in the word, or in pairs of words (in the traditional sense of collocational pairs) but in stretches of words of phrasal or clausal length, and in complexes of features which reflect restrictions that are neither purely lexical nor purely syntactic.” Naturalness is a property of text, and the case for studying the nature of text is a strong one.

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See Partington 1998 for a clear outline of ways in which corpus linguistics can usefully inform language teaching, particularly with regards to lexis.

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References Benson, M. Benson, E and Ilson R.,1997 (revised ed.), The BBI Dictionary of English Word Combinations, Amsterdam, John Benjamins Publishing Company. Collins Cobuild English Dictionary, 2nd edition, HarperCollins. Cobuild English Collocations on CD-ROM, HarperCollins. Cobuild Direct, http://titania.cobuild.collins.co.uk/form.html (accessed on 15th September, 2002) De Beaugrande, R. 2002, "Large Corpora, Small Corpora, and the Learning of ‘Language’" in Ghadessy, M et al. Francis, G. 1993, "A corpus-driven approach to grammar: principles, methods and examples" in Text and Technology, Essays in honour of John Sinclair, Amsterdam, John Benjamins. Pp.137-156. Ghadessy, M., Henry, A. and Roseberry, R.L. 2002, Small Corpus Studies and ELT, Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Halliday, M.A.K. and Hasan, R. 1976, Cohesion in English, London: Longman. Hunston, S. 2002, Corpora in Applied Linguistics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lewis, M. 1997, Implementing the Lexical Approach, London, Language Teaching Publications. Lewis, M. 1993, The Lexical Approach, London, Language Teaching Publications. Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners, 2002, Macmillan. McCarthy, M. (ed.) 1988, Naturalness in Language, Birmingham, the University of Birmingham, ELR Monograph. McCarthy, M. and Carter, R. 1994, Language as discourse: perspectives for language teaching. London: Longman. Owen, C. 1998, “Naturalness and the Language Learner” in M.McCarthy, 1988. Partington, Alan, 1998, Patterns and Meanings: Using Corpora for English Language Research and Teaching, Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Porcelli, G and Dolci, R. 1999, Multimedialità e insegnamenti linguistici, Turin, Utet Libreria. Sinclair, J.M.1991, Corpus, Concordance, Collocation, Oxford, OUP.

Milan, 19th September, 2002. V.1. Via Monte Rosa, 47, 20149 Milan.

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