ABSTRACT
As mentioned in the Preface, grammar and vocabulary description (including explanation) is an essential part of language description —the analysis and description of how a language works (i.e., how its lexical, morphological, and syntactical components combine to convey meanings). 1 Historically, language description has focused almost exclusively on grammar, a practice rooted in the long tradition of treating grammar and vocabulary as two separate domains, with the former dealing strictly with the study of language rules and the latter referring simply to the individual words in a language. In language teaching, this separation has often been shown by the fact that there are textbooks and classes devoted exclusively to one or the other (especially to grammar). However, contemporary linguistic research findings from functional, Cognitive, and corpus linguistics have seriously challenged this rigid separation of the two. It has been found that grammar and vocabulary are actually two inherently connected parts of one entity or the two ends of one continuum because “a grammatical structure may be lexically restricted” (Francis, 1993, p. 104) and, conversely, lexical items are not only grammatically confined (i.e., confined to certain grammatical structures) but also grammatical in nature themselves because the choice of a lexical item often has implication for the sentence structure it appears in (Biber, Conrad, & Reppen, 1998; Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, & Finegan, 1999; Hunston & Francis, 2000). As a result of this new finding, many linguists and applied linguists have argued for the integration of grammar and vocabulary in the study of language and have adopted the term lexicogrammar to describe this integration (e.g., Halliday, 1994; Hunston & Francis, 2000). This book adopts this approach to language description by covering both grammar and vocabulary. Given this fact and the fact that the term “language description” may not be clear enough about what it means or what it actually covers, the book is thus entitled Describing and explaining grammar and vocabulary in ELT. However, for the sake of simplicity, “language description” rather than “grammar and vocabulary description” will be used most of the time hereafter in this book.
