Teach english new edition r

corpuses 
(collections of articles, novels, recorded 
speech, journals, etc stored electronically). These corpuses (and the software which allows 
them to be analysed) were developed towards the end of the twentieth century - and this 
development process is still ongoing. Corpuses allow us to have a m uch clearer idea of 
when and how often word collocations occur.
Lexical chunks
Corpuses have shown us something else we have always been aware of - b ut which is now 
more demonstrably the case. This is that words group together into longer 
lexical phrases
or 
lexical chunks. 
Lexical chunks are strings of words which behave almost as one unit. 
Some o f these are fixed (which means you can’t change any of the words, e.g. 
over the moon,
out o f the blue),
and some of them are semi-fixed (which means you can change some of the 
words, e.g. 
nice to see you/good to see you/great to see you,
etc).
O ur ability to use the language effectively depends largely on a knowledge of lexical 
chunking of this kind. In certain varieties of English, for example, speakers may well use 
phrases like ‘It’s a safe bet t h a t . . . ’ to preface a strong speculation, or ‘I wouldn’t go that far’ 
to show only partial agreement.
Lexical chunks become more or less problematic depending on how idiomatic they 
are. An 
idiom 
is a lexical phrase where the meaning of the whole phrase may not be 
comprehensible even if we know the meaning of each individual word (e.g. ‘full of beans’ 
= energetic, ‘as plain as the nose on your face’ = obvious). Many phrasal and multi-word 
verbs cause problems for learners precisely because they are idiomatic in this way. We
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Chapter 5
should note, however, that many idioms are extremely culture-specific and so may not be 
that useful anyway in international contexts.