|
Who's
afraid of Virginia Woolf?
By
Scott Thornbury
In
a radio broadcast made in 1929, the English writer Virginia
Woolf had this to say about words: "Words, English words,
are full of echoes, memories, associations. They've been out
and about, on peoples' lips, in their houses, on the streets,
in the fields, for so many centuries…". These "echoes,
memories, associations" that words accrue are what we
now call a word's connotations, and they will vary
from person to person. The word field (in the Woolf
quote above) will have quite different associations for a
farmer and a city-dweller, for example, or for a hunter and
an ecologist, or for a cricketer and a soldier. Nevertheless,
knowing a word means knowing something about those connotations
of the word that are generally shared between speakers of
the language as a whole - knowing what makes a field
so different from a meadow or a prairie, for
example, or from the Spanish campo or an Egyptian feddan.
Virginia
Woolf goes on to say that: "It is a very obvious but
always mysterious fact that a word is not a single and separate
entity: it is part of other words… words belong to each
other". Here she neatly captures the interdependence
of words, and that knowing a word means not only knowing its
connotations but knowing the words that it commonly occurs
with - its collocations. Hence, part of knowing the
word field is knowing that it collocates with words
like study, vision and view (as in his
chosen field of study) as well as in such combinations
as field trip, field test and field work,
and magnetic field, gas field and ice field.
A
third feature of word knowledge that Woolf identifies is the
way that this knowledge is organised into semantic networks
- highly idiosyncratic and much more convoluted than the relatively
straightforward word lists you find in textbooks. She writes:
"[Words] are the wildest, freest, most irresponsible,
most unteachable of all things. Of course, you can catch them
and sort them and place them in alphabetical order in dictionaries.
But words do not live in dictionaries: they live in the mind.
… And how do they live in the mind? Variously and strangely,
much as human beings live, ranging hither and thither, falling
in love, meeting together."
The
fact, well attested by linguists and teachers, that words
are context-sensitive was also evident to Woolf: "[They
do not] like being lifted on the point of a pin and examined
separately. They hang together in sentences, paragraphs, sometimes
whole pages at a time". Hence, to say that someone works
in the same field may mean two quite different things,
depending on whether it is said by a farm labourer or a rocket
scientist. Attempting to define words apart from their contexts
of use is - as teachers well know - an often perilous activity.
Part
of a word's resistance to easy definition is due to the amazing
elasticity of words, as they constantly adapt - and are adapted
- to new uses, new needs, new contexts, new users. "In
short [Woolf observes] they hate anything that stamps them
with one meaning or confines them to one attitude. For what
is their nature, but change. Perhaps that is their most striking
peculiarity - their need of change. This is because the truth
they are trying to catch is many-sided, and they convey it
by being many-sided, dashing first this way then that,
saying one thing to one person, another thing to another person…"
All
this provides a challenge to the learner - and to the teacher.
Part of the pleasure of word-learning, though, is to experience
the power of words - including their resilience over time
- a living proof of which is the way Virginia Woolf's own
words still resonate many decades after they were first uttered.
You can hear them on: http://www.bbc.co.uk/voices/pages/profilepages/woolfv1.shtml
©
2002 Scott Thornbury
Back
to:
Scott
Thornbury biography
Vocabulary - is it more than words?
Vocabuary bibliography
|
