Teach english new edition r

present
If you pay online, you get a 
discount.
You get a discount if you pay 
online.
If 
1
had a dog, I’d take it for 
w alks.
I’d take a dog for w alks if 
1
had 
one.
talking about the 
future
If you work hard, you’ll pass the 
exam.
You’ll pass the exam if you work 
hard.
If 
1
won the lottery, I’d travel 
round the world.
If 
1
were you I’d get a new jacket.
talking about the 
past
If it was very warm, we ate 
outside.
We ate outside if it was very 
warm.
If I’d known about the rail strike, 
1
would have come by car.
1
would have come by car if I’d 
known about the rail strike.
The chart shows how the order of the clauses can be reversed with little change in meaning. 
We also need to rem ember that many conditional sentences are variations on these basic 
patterns, using a wide range of different tenses and verb types, e.g. ‘If you finish before 
time, hand your papers in and go’, ‘If it rains like it looks like it’s going to rain, we’re 
going to get soaked’, ‘If I’d been informed about this, I could solve the problem’ - and, in 
American English sometimes, ‘If I would have met her earlier, I would have m arried her’, 
though this use o f ‘would’ in both clauses (instead o f only in the result clause) is considered 
unacceptable by many speakers of British English.
Words together
Students frequently worry about the meaning of individual words. Yet a marked feature 
of the way we construct and understand language is that far from putting together strings 
of individual words, we actually use collections of vocabulary items that frequently occur
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Describing language
together in pairs of groups, as this excerpt from the novel 
Small Island
by Andrea Levy 
(about Jamaican imm igrants to Britain ) makes clear:
Louis now believed bloodyforeigner to be all one word. For, like bosom pals, he only
ever heard those words spoken together.
We will look at three specific instances of words that group together: collocations, lexical 
chunks and idiom.
Collocations
If any two words occur together more often than just by chance, we often call them
collocations. In other words, when you hear the word ‘asleep’ there is a good chance that 
the word ‘fast’ will be used with it (‘fast asleep’). In the example above, Louis has worked 
out that if he hears the word ‘pals’, the word ‘bosom ’ will be hovering around, too, and he 
never hears the word ‘foreigner’ occurring w ithout ‘bloody’ in front of it.
Knowledge of collocation is an im portant part of knowing a word. For example, the 
Longman Dictionary o f Contemporary English
(
LDOCE
) lists the following collocations for 
the word ‘heavy’, when it means ‘great in am ount, degree or severity’: heavy traffic, heavy 
rain/snow, heavy fighting, heavy drinker, heavy smoking, heavy smoker, heavy burden, 
heavy demands, heavy pressure, heavy fine, heavy casualties, heavy losses, heavy defeat, 
heavy cold, heavy use. The reason for this listing is that even though ‘heavy’ (with this 
meaning) may sometimes be used with other words, a study of language shows that it is 
m ost often found in the company of the words indicated (traffic, demands, casualties, etc). 
Furthermore, even though this meaning of ‘heavy’ is not unlike the word ‘big’, we do not 
often find ‘big’ collocating with words like ‘smoker’ and ‘casualties’.
The compilers of 
LDOCE
(and other dictionaries) can be confident about these issues 
because they have studied large com puter