Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1998. Vol. 2. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 26)

Book reviews - Endre Abkarovits: Collins COBUILD Grammar Patterns. Volumes 1 and 2.

define as a fact about lexis or a fact about grammar. In structural linguistics grammar was the most important, while lexis was often seen as a separate entity. Even the most comprehensive grammar books, like those of Quirk et al, tend to downplay the role of the lexical side of grammar, they don't distinguish between what is possible and what is typical, either because they do not find it important or because they did not have access to enough information. (Hunston and Francis, forthcoming) The change in the method of observing data (the use of the concordance lines of a computational database) can also easily lead to the change in theory. Though at this stage we still cannot expect the authors to come up with some final theoretical conclusions, they have already observed certain tendencies in the correlation of meaning and form (pattern). Some of these are the following: 1. When a word has more than one meaning, the meanings tend to be distinguished by having different patterns, but there is a lack of one-to-one correspondence between pattern and meaning. 2. Words with the same pattern share aspects of meaning. But the lists of words that have the same pattern are divisable in several ways, and different researchers could end up with different groupings. (Hunston and Francis, forthcoming) So, it is no wonder that looking at the different groups we might find these divisions often arbitrary. And there will always be words that do not fit into any group. Still, we cannot say that attempts at grouping words in this way would be useless. This problem is similar to the dilemma of lexicographers, who have to separate the various senses of a word when compiling their dictionaries, in which patterning plays an important part, but not the whole. It is still to be seen whether the use of corpora (records of language use) will lead to a theory based on phraseology and coexist with other theories or some earlier theory will evolve, perhaps using the new evidence. With the help of their practice book and in some papers the authors of the grammar patterns series also try to give ideas to teachers and learners of English in what ways their books could be used in learning English as a second or foreign language. They started giving lists of verbs, nouns, adjectives in a given pattern as early as in the 1990 edition of the Collins Cobuild English Grammar, and this has been taken to its logical conclusion in the grammar pattern books. Though the authors claim that a pattern approach can be adapted to any type of syllabus, they also point out that the lexical approach is the most suitable for this purpose. 187