Stephen James Coffey

Phrasal Settings in Which the Definite and Indefinite Articles Appear to Be Interchangeable in English: An Exploratory Study

This paper investigates the fact that some English phrases may be used with either the definite or the indefinite article, without any obvious change in meaning or effect. Whereas many types of phrasal variation have been documented in the literature, there is little description of this particular phenomenon. Examples are given of a number of phrasal types, ranging from opaque idiomatic expressions to fairly transparent word strings. Contextualized examples are provided, mainly from the British National Corpus but also from corpus-based reference works.

A nightmare of a trip, a gem of a hotel: The study of an evaluative and descriptive frame

This paper describes a lexico-grammatical frame which may be exemplified by the phrase a nightmare of a trip. The internal semantics are a defining feature of the frame: the second noun is likened in some way to the first noun (the ‘trip’ was a ‘nightmare’). By examining many sets of concordance lines generated from the British National Corpus, a database was created containing 380 examples of the frame. The present article describes these phrases from a number of points of view: their internal lexico-semantic structure, their communicative functions, their place within syntactic structure, and their relation to text type.

Investigating restricted semantic sets in a large general corpus: learning activities for students of English as a foreign language

This article describes a type of foreign language learning activity in which concordancing techniques, integrated with more usual classroom activities, are used to raise awareness of certain features of content words in ‘general English’. In particular, the activity aims to highlight participation of lexis in compounds and multiword units; collocational preference; divisibility of general meaning into separate but related senses; relationship between sense distinction and collocational preference; figurative usages; words and phrases of cultural significance.In the activity described, the focus of attention is restricted semantic sets such as those of COLOURS or METALS. There are a number of advantages in using such sets. Firstly, many of the words have interesting phraseological patterning, multiple senses and cultural associations. Secondly, learners are not just finding out about random words but about words which have strong semantic links with each other: this enables comparisons to be made, thus highlighting the communicative aspect of the activity. Thirdly, in a potentially alienating situation (hundreds of short lines of text), learners should be helped by the fact that they are investigating core content words with a strong physical meaning.