Alliteration and assonance

Ugly title, I know, but the post is short and worth reading. Bear with me for a few lines.

First things first:

1. Alliteration: The repetition of consonants within words in close proximity.

Don’t delay dawns disarming display
Dusk demands daylight
Dewdrops dwell delicately
Drawing dazzling delight
(Paul McCann, “Dewdrops Dancing Down Daisies”)

2. Assonance: The repetition of vowel-sounds within non-rhyming words.

And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride
(Edgar Allan Poe, “Annabel Lee”)

3. Lexical chunk: A group of words commonly found together.

-Did you stay long at the party?
-No, I got out as soon as they ran out of food.

Here’s a short summary of something I learned while putting together my BRAZ-TESOL workshop on lexical chunks:

The sheer number of lexical chunks in natural language, coupled with students’ tendency to overlook key multi-word combinations (remember the Betty White post?) have led a lot of people to question the feasibility of large-scale chunk-learning. We’re talking about classroom learning, of course.

Also, very few approaches to chunk-learning have looked beyond the initial noticing stage and those who have suffer from severe limitations. For example, having students associate chunks with mental images probably does help to increase retention, but that can only apply to figurative expressions.

In the middle of a Google search, however, I stumbled upon a set of slides which really caught my eye. The writer reported some interesting evidence that chunks containing alliteration and assonance are ubiquitous in English phraseology and have a significant mnemonic effect. In other words, they’re very common and easier to remember. For example:

First and foremost, commit a crime, tell a tale, do damage vs make a mess (something tells me these last two examples are purely accidental), fundamentally flawed (“badly flawed” has far fewer google occurrences), peer pressure, hit and miss, say a prayer, high time…

So, at first glance, it looks as if not all lexical choices are as arbitrary as we might like to think. I still need to give this a lot of thought and try to collect my own evidence, but it’s refreshing to see someone in the field of Applied Linguistics conducting research that might actually cross over into language teaching one day.

Thanks for reading.