Programas, proyectos, asistencia técnica y nuevos instrumentos

The key terms utilised in this study include word, lexicon, lexical item, lexeme and collocation. To place these terms in order from the specific to the more general, word can be defined first. Matthews (2007) defines a word as ‘the smallest of the units that make up a sentence, and marked as such in writing’ (Matthews 2007: 436–7). Singleton (2000) indicates that the ‘linguists’ attempts to provide a general characterization of the word have made reference to quite a wide variety of possible defining properties’ (Singleton 2000: 1) and discusses ‘[t]he main lines of these different approaches’ (Singleton 2000: 6), which include the orthographic approach, phonetic approach, phonological approach, semantic approach and grammatical approach (see Singleton 2000: 7–10). To illustrate the terms as they will be employed in this study, considering the related areas here of SLA, corpus linguistics and semantics, they are defined as follows:

Lexicon, as Singleton (2000) indicates, ‘basically means “dictionary”, and it is the term used by linguists to refer to those aspects of a language which relate to words, otherwise known as its lexical aspects’ (Singleton 2000: 1). In defining lexicon Baker, Hardie and McEnery (2006) refer to the term as a ‘list of words’, suggesting that

[i]n corpus linguistics, this usually refers to a list of words held on computer, sometimes with extra information about each word on the list. But one may also speak of “the lexicon of a language”. This refers to all the words that exist in that language – which cannot ever be fully listed in practice, since new words are being created all the time.

(Baker, Hardie & McEnery 2006: 108; emphasis in original) Lexicon in corpus linguistic terms can also refer to the number of tokens in a corpus (see Baker, Hardie & McEnery 2006: 162). According to Lewis (2008: 8), lexicon does not merely consist of single-word items, but also features multi-word items of seeing so that ‘the other categories … provide the novelty and pedagogic challenge’ of

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words (single lexical items), collocations, fixed expressions and semi-fixed expressions (Lewis 2008: 8). Therefore, when referring to Dickens’s lexicon, this signposts the entirety of lexical items employed in Dickens’s works in contexts that could be any one of the four categories mentioned above.

Lexical item, also referred to as full, lexical or content words, points towards those words that embody significant meaning, even where they are found beyond the boundaries of context (Singleton 2000). Lexical items are commonly contrasted against function words (also referred to as grammatical, empty or form words), as the latter typically have little or no meaning when employed independently and perform a broadly grammatical purpose (Singleton 2000). Examples include, the, to, for (see Appendix 1.1 for a list of 320 function words suggested by Nation 2001).

Lexeme, also called word form, is ‘a lexeme's concrete representatives or realizations’ (Singleton 2000: 5). This concept will be helpful when discussing Dickens’s word families. Word family refers to ‘related forms or as an abstract unit which is realized by one or other of these forms as the linguistic environment demands - calls to mind the concept of the phoneme and its allophones’ (Singleton 2000: 5). Jeffries (2006) considers that the nomenclature of lexeme is typically employed to indicate ‘a collection of forms that are grouped together under the same denotation’ (Jeffries 2006: 158), with Singleton (2000) concurring that the concept of the word as either a class of forms or ‘an abstract unit’ is embraced in the term lexeme. An associated terminology is the citation form of the word, which is employed in association with the meaning of a text and its semantic content, with the distinction between content and function words being often drawn. With respect to lemmas, corpus software can lemmatise lexemes by categorising various words or their forms (Matthews 2007). Thus, the two terms ‘headword’ or ‘lexeme’ can be considered as being interchangeable when applied to vocabulary or keyword analysis: they are both in their basic forms that can extend to other possible forms. Further potential terms that can represent the same phenomena include the canonical and dictionary forms and citation form. Kennedy (1998), referring to lemmas and

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headwords, states that ‘it is normal in corpus studies to list under the same headword or lemma the inflectional variants’ (Kennedy 1998, cited in Knowles & Don 2004: 70).

Collocation, according to Baker, Hardie and McEnery (2006), refers to the phenomenon that particular words have a higher likelihood of occurring in association with other certain words in particular contexts. Therefore, a collocate is a word which occurs with frequency ‘within the neighbourhood of another word’ (Baker, Hardie & McEnery 2006: 35–6). Stylistically, Halliday (2007) asserts that collocation ‘is a highly effective stylistic device’ (Halliday 2007: 153), stating:

The collocation of words is the basic formal relation in lexis. It is extremely important for the study of the language of poetry, since poets, and writers in general, draw their effects in part from the interaction of familiar with new collocations; and the creation of new collocations, interacting with other linguistic features, is a highly effective stylistic device.

(Halliday 2007: 153) On the other hand, and from an SLA perspective, Schmitt (2000) considers that ‘[c]ollocation is an advanced type of vocabulary knowledge’ (Schmitt 2000: 89; emphasis in original), and thus demands specific attention in order to be learned effectively. Assisted reading tasks are suggested in this study besides learning vocabulary, as their discourse promotes the acquisition of collocations.

Carter (1998) suggests that a ‘main argument throughout is that lexical items in discourse require to be constantly interpreted and re-interpreted by the language user and that, when analysts move beyond constructed examples to a consideration of real texts, the “values” of lexis become of considerable significance’ (Carter 1998: 80).

Lexical competence reflects a significant portion of language proficiency, as it indicates that the learner can comprehend the meanings of lexical items and their interrelations, and their receptive or productive use, in addition to other morphological and grammatical facets of the lexical items. One of the manifestations of the relationship between lexical items is the collocational formations.

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In his objection to Chomsky’s concept of linguistic competence as a framework that shines light on the linguistic knowledge native speakers possess of a language, which he distinguishes from linguistic performance (i.e. the manner in which a language system is employed in enable communication), Hymes (1972) proposes the notion of

communicative competence. In noting that the linguistic and grammatical rules known by speakers are not sufficient to continue to establish the right level of communication in the community, Hymes (1972) introduces the need for communicative competence, which assists in establishing successful communication that is appropriate for the context. Thus, this term has centred on the social component of language and the function of social practice in the completion of the role of theoretical linguistic competence (see Bagarić & Djigunović (2007) for a detailed discussion of Chomsky and Hymes’s positions on competences).

The communicative competence impact extends beyond the linguistic theoretical discussions to affect other fields in Applied Linguistics and the teaching of EFL. The communicative approach as a teaching methodology is informed by the concept of communicative competence, leading to situational/contextual teaching and to language learning for specific purposes. The curriculum design is also affected by these important concepts (see Stelma (2010) for a detailed account of the impact of communicative competence on language teaching). Therefore, the study of Dickens’s lexicon falls within this category, as investigating the lexical items from a functional perspective and considering their role in communication and the use of language are related to the notion of communicative competence (both functionally and communicatively).

Lewis (2008) discusses the nature of fluency and its dependency on the breadth of the learner’s lexicon, which is itself reliant on the volume and quality of the linguistic input that the learner has been exposed to. The potentiality of investigating lexical items from the discourse analysis perspective stretches beyond the conventional boundaries of teaching vocabulary (e.g. wordlists, and meanings at the level of sentences).

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McCarthy and Carter (1994) indicate towards Halliday and Hasan's (1976) ‘description of lexical cohesion’ in investigating the vocabulary patterns as ‘research into vocabulary in extended texts’ (Halliday & Hasan 1976, cited in McCarthy & Carter 1994: 65). The concept of ‘lexical cohesion’ in the context of studying vocabulary, as in discourse analysis, in a way refers to the ‘repetition of words’, and such repetition can produce ‘certain basic semantic relations between words in creating textuality, that property of text which distinguishes it from a random sequence of unconnected sentences’ (McCarthy & Carter 1994: 65; emphasis in original). This offers a different perspective on vocabulary than other disciplines such as the semantic or syntactic approaches which focus on the isolated meanings that relate to a specific context or the grammatical or structural characteristics, that is, the function of the word in a sentence, without broadening the study of that meaning into an extended text or discourse. So, it could be argued that the status of vocabulary in the discourse exceeds the isolated significance or meaning, or its simple grammatical function, to arrive at the function of production and receiving the discourse, which contribute to its features and the manner in which it can be discussed. The status of the vocabulary in the discourse represents the associated semantic, structural and communicative elements. As discourse analysis focuses on the concept of the text and elements leading to it, it is natural to consider the vocabulary from a new viewpoint, albeit one that depends on the semantic and lexical data; but the purpose in discourse analysis is the investment of these semantic relations in producing a coherent discourse, and thus does not restrict its search to the semantic relations without their associated discourse context. The application of stylistic analysis techniques is intended to support learners at advance levels of proficiency, due to the fact that the purpose of such methodology is to assist them to comprehend the functionality of how words create discourse, and how they can contribute towards identifying the characteristics of the discourse and its type. Therefore, the purpose is not only to teach and acquire the vocabulary, but rather to understand how they function and create meanings in a given discourse.

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Behnam (1996: 18) reports that Carter (1986) encourages a transition from the solely text-based tradition towards a discipline that is more oriented to the social and communicative domains, thus moving away from the analysis of ‘literature as text’ towards that of ‘literature as discourse’ (Carter 1986, cited in Behnam 1996: 18), as per the stance forwarded by Widdowson (1975).