They come in clusters
on March 16, 2008
in misc, weird words
Soft fruit, like grapes and blackcurrants. Flowers, like lilac. Trees, shrubs and smaller plants in a well-kept English country garden. Stars, galaxies and multiverses, something that few of us ever have a chance to inspect. Music comes in clusters, when a mad composer hits several keys of the piano with the palm of his hand to produce a mass of sound. Clubbers, when seized by hunger they flock to Bar Italia at five in the morning.
But for language learners and teachers more important are the mind-blowing facts, continually delivered these days through corpus linguistics – a language can be seen a universe of word clusters. These are 2 to 6-word units that we repeatedly stumble across in speech and writing. Clusters evidently escape simple grammar categorization and often pull down the barrier created between vocabulary and grammar. When naturally retrieved from memory, they define the boundaries of the speaker’s fluency.
The beauty of commonest English clusters is that they can be listed as ever changing charts, and like songs, are instantly recognizable.
A selection of spoken English clusters, ranging between 2 and 5 words: you know; I mean; sort of; and then; if you; you can; a lot of; you know what; I think it’s; a couple of; and it was; I thought it was; I don’t know if; I was going to; have a look at; you don’t have to; in the middle of; you know what I mean; the end of the day; this that and the other; to be honest with you; and all that sort of; an hour and a half; it’s a bit of a;
Star cluster
