The Analysis of 'Pour': A Lesson Learned for Understanding Vocabulary

Abstract

The centrality of lexis has been a prominent issue in lexical studies in second language learning (Richards, 1976; Ard and Gass, 1987; Willis, 1990; Clark, 1993, Coady and Huckin, 1997). This research article aims to shed light on understanding vocabulary in a different perspective by examining the nature of vocabulary through the observation of the verb pour in corpus citations. The results indicate that a large part of the grammatical aspect is lexically related. The corpus citations display the properties of the verb pour that include its various senses of meaning, syntactic structures it can fill in, typical subjects and objects they co-occur with, and argument structures. These properties generally determine the verb meaning and how it should appear in sentences and collocate with other words, and at the same time distinguish from other verbs' behaviour. This corpus-based study confirms the unique complexity of the verb lexicon. The acquisition of lexicon is then the competence that includes the knowledge of the lexical properties. For a learner, it would imply that the encoded structural aspects should be learned as an integral part of learning vocabulary. Hence, it would render the teaching of grammar to some extent redundant.