COMPARATIVE COLLOCATIONAL COMPETENCE AS AN ESP SKILL

COMPARATIVE COLLOCATIONAL COMPETENCE AS AN ESP SKILL

Pleše, Dubravka
Bogdanović, Vesna

Learning a language always means learning not only grammar and vocabulary but specific terms and phrases as well, characteristic for the target language and very different from the mother tongue of the learner. This is even more true of the language taught at the tertiary educational level, i.e. language for specific purposes or professional foreign language. Even though learning phraseology and new vocabulary is difficult enough in itself, collocations usually represent an even greater problem since the words that appear together (i.e. collocate) have completely different meanings than they do when they appear by themselves. The major problem areas appear to be teaching, learning and translating special words as examples of lexical units. The aim of this paper is to investigate the importance of collocations, contexts and probable situations in the creation and usage of collocations. Our particular field of interest were collocations found in texts dealing with petroleum engineering and traffic engineering. The emphasis of the paper was on comparative collocational competence in Croatian, Serbian and English. Efforts were made to show how the core meaning expressed in one language is communicated in another and how this non-specific meaning becomes more specific in three different languages. The diversities between the three languages were also to be analyzed. Apart from the theoretical linguistic approach, we also wanted to point out the importance of extra linguistic context, which is crucial in shaping the actual shades of meaning. We also endeavored to explain the complex relationship between lexical elements that combine to form collocations used in highly specific, scientific fields, in this case, in mining, geology, petroleum engineering, transport and traffic engineering.

Conference or Workshop Item
PeerReviewed

2014

3404