NOUNS AND THE NOUN PHRASE
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It is apparent from this example that, in addition to other problems such as fragments, personal pronoun uses, punctuation, and somewhat informal register, the noun company is repeated excessively. However, other nouns are readily accessible and practical for students to use in similar courses and contexts: Company—business, concern (if large), firm, enterprise, venture (if new)
To construct such lists of nouns with similar or contextually appropriate meanings, not much research is required. In many cases, when teachers have trouble coming up with a list of useful alternatives in a particular context, they can resort to looking up words in a thesaurus. Most experienced teachers have discovered that they cannot just recommend that their students use a thesaurus. As with dictionaries, using a thesaurus without the adequate lexical base needed to tell appropriate from inappropriate entries can be difficult. For example, according to the Roget's Thesaurus (1994), the noun company can have the following partial synonyms: NOUNS 1. fellowship, companionship, society, fraternity, fraternization 2. firm, business firm, concern, house,... business, industry, enterprise, business establishment, commercial enterprise; cast, acting company, troupe, repertory company, stock company
Unless NNS writers already know the meaning of such words as cast, troupe, and repertory, they may simply be unable to tell the difference between a business company and acting company (does the acting company mean an active company?). Furthermore, the distinctions among the meanings of company, house, and industry are substantial enough to make the student's excerpt in (3) very confusing. As mentioned earlier, a strong vocabulary base is needed to consult dictionaries and thesauri and choose a noun appropriate in a particular context. Constructing a list of appropriate lexical substitutions that can be used in writing does not have to be complicated. A typical college-educated NS of English has a vocabulary range of 17,000 word families that together comprise about 150,000 words (Nation, 1990; see chap. 3). Thus, when compiling lists of nouns that can be used in similar contexts, most L2 teachers do not need to look much farther than their own lexicon, even if in doing so they stand a chance of missing an appropriate noun or two. VOCABULARY IN UNIVERSITY WRITING Research on the vocabulary range needed to write basic academic text has shown that a foundation of 2,000 to 3,000 words can go a long way toward a successful production of assignments and essays in many disciplines. In fact, according to some studies, 95% of all academic texts at the undergraduate
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