Volume 8 (2017) Issue 1
A
Corpus-Based Approach to Distinguishing the
Near-Synonyms
Listen
and Hear
Siaw-Fong
Chung (Taipei, Taiwan (R.O.C.))
Abstract
The
present study aimed to compare the verbs listen
(to) and
hear
based on lexical resources and corpora, including
(a)
WordNet, which contains sense frequency information taken from
the
Brown Corpus and The
Red Badge of Courage;
(b)
the British National Corpus (BNC); and (c) a writing task for
English
learners that focused on the uses of listen
(to)
and hear.
The two verbs
were
compared in terms of sense frequency
distributions
as well as collocational information. Similarities and differences
between the uses
of
the verbs listen
(to)
and hear
were also analyzed using Sketch Engine, a lexical resource
that
enables collocational patterns from the BNC
to
be displayed according to grammatical relations. In the
writing
task, it was found that, for both verbs, students focused on a
certain meaning. In addition, the BNC
showed
different sense distributions compared with WordNet and the learner
data, as well as
more
figurative meanings.
Both
learner data and WordNet were predominant in the use of literal
meanings for both verbs. This study contributes to the practice of
connecting corpus data to teaching and learning.
Keywords:
near-synonyms, listen (to), hear,
corpus,
collocation, learner
1
Introduction
It
has commonly been found
that
learners are often confused by the close meanings of near-synonymous
words. Taylor (2003), for example, defines
synonymy
as
“a single meaning [which] is symbolized by two or more distinct phonological forms” (Taylor 2003: 246)
indicating
that synonyms are words that share a similar meaning. Nevertheless,
many (e.g. Lyons 1968, Taylor 2003) have noted that perfect synonyms
are very infrequent and that most synonyms are near-synonyms:
[P]erfect synonymy is vanishingly rare, methodologically proscribed, or a logical impossibility, what we frequently do encounter are pairs of words that are ‘‘near’’ synonyms” (Taylor 2003: 265)
In
other words, two closely related words are seldom used in exactly the
same way. Moreover, near-synonyms usually differ in a subtle way, as
Bolinger (1977 noted,
“if two ways of saying something differ in their words or their arrangement they will also differ in meaning.’ (Bolinger 1977: 1)
With
regard to near-synonyms, some studies have focused on the semantic
distinctions between the compared
words. With
the help of computer-aided technology, studies on near-synonyms can
now be carried out, based on abundant computer-generated data. For
example, in a corpus-based study on the English verbs start
and begin,
Biber et al. (1998) discovered differences between these two verbs
through their semantic behaviors and complement types. Liu (2010)
identified the semantic meanings and pattern differences of five
synonymous - the adjectives chief,
main,
major,
primary,
and principal
-
using a corpus. Chief et al. (2000), on the other hand, used corpus
data
to
examine the distributional patterns of the Chinese
near-synonyms方便fang1bian4
and
便利bian4li4
(both
mean “to be convenient”). Most studies on near-synonyms,
regardless of the part-of-speech they analyzed, have so far arrived
at the consensus that near-synonyms can be distinguished in terms of
semantic and/or syntactic patterns. It has been stated that the lack
of knowledge of the distinctions among near-synonyms could be one
reason students use them incorrectly (Partington 1998, Hoey 2000,
McEnery & Xiao 2006).
In
the present paper, the English
near-synonym pair listen
(to) and
hear
was examined using different types of corpora.1
The
overall purpose of this study was to first conduct a corpus-based
analysis of listen
(to) and
hear
and, later, to apply the information gathered from the corpora to a
writing task. The research questions are as follows:
(a)
How can a corpus-based study elicit similarities and differences
between the verbs listen
(to) and
hear?
(b)
How do the verbs listen
(to)
and hear
behave
linguistically when observed in a general corpus and in a writing
task?
These
research questions will be answered based on three sets of data:
- WordNet 2.1, which contains the sense information of each word taken from two corpora (the Brown Corpus and Stephen Crane’s novella The Red Badge of Courage) (Landes et al. 1998);
- a randomly selected sample from a native-speaker corpus (British National Corpus); and
- a collection of data based on a writing task.
Among
these data, the first two are data from native-speaker corpora.
As
Ellis and Barkhuizen (2005) pointed out, one way to understand how
language learners acquire a second language is to examine their
language production. Our study examined the similarities and
differences between the verbs listen
(to) and
hear
produced
in a guided writing
task
versus
the
corpus data. In addition, we also made use of WordNet (Miller et al.
1990, Fellbaum 1998) to examine the senses of the two
verbs.2
The
comparisons between the lexical resource and the corpora data should
achieve the following results:
- show how the uses of these two verbs may (or may not) differ in different corpora; and
- provide an opportunity to compare the uses of these two verbs in a task based on which elicitations of these two verbs are intentional.
In
the following section, the methodology employed will be discussed.
2
Methodology
Two
main types of data were used, namely, native-speaker data and learner
data. The native-speaker data were constituted by the analyses of
senses in WordNet and the British National Corpus (BNC), while the
learner data were comprised of students’ writings,
which
were collected through a designed activity.
Our
methodology can be divided into three main steps:
- The meanings of the verbs listen and hear as well as their respective sense frequencies were compared based on their senses provided by WordNet 2.1. This comparison of senses also ensured that these two verbs share at least one meaning so as to qualify as near-synonyms.
- The analyses of the two verbs were then carried out based on 500 random examples taken from the BNC.3 The analyses were based on collocations, verb forms, and the meanings of the two verbs, and each instance was compared to the senses provided by WordNet 2.1. Statistical data on collocations and verb forms were extracted from Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff & Tugwell 2001), a lexical resource that enables collocational patterns to be displayed according to grammatical relations, such as subject, object, and modifier.
- The data from the BNC were further compared to the elicited data collected from a writing task.
3
Analysis
3.1
Step One: WordNet
The
search in WordNet 2.1 was conducted so as to investigate the senses
of the verbs listen
and
hear
and to further decide whether the two are near-synonyms. The senses
and their respective sense frequencies are
presented in Table 1 below. As
mentioned above, the frequencies shown in Table 1 represent the
frequencies provided by WordNet based on the occurrences of the two
verbs in
two
corpora - the Brown Corpus and Stephen Crane’s novella The
Red Badge of Courage.
The numbers
in
Table 1
indicate
how frequently these senses
were found in these two corpora.
Listen
|
Hear
|
||||
Senses
|
WordNet
2.1
|
Frequency
(in
percent)
|
Senses
|
WordNet
2.1
|
Frequency
(in
percent)
|
1
|
Hear
with intention.
(e.g.,
Listen to the sound of this cello.)
|
60
(61.2%)
|
1
|
Perceive
sound via the auditory sense.
|
275
(77.5%)
|
2
|
Listen
and pay attention.
(e.g.,
Listen
to your father.)
|
34
(34.7%)
|
2
|
Get
to know or become aware of, usually accidentally.
(e.g.,
I
heard that you have been promoted.)
|
60
(16.9%)
|
3
|
Pay
close attention to.
(e.g.,
Listen
to the advice of the old man.)
|
4
(4.1%)
|
3
|
Hear
evidence by judicial process.
(e.g.,
The
jury had heard all the evidence.)
|
12
(3.4%)
|
4
|
Receive
a communication from someone.
(e.g.,
We
heard nothing from our son for five years.)
|
8
(2.3%)
|
|||
5
|
Listen
and pay attention.
(e.g.,
We
must hear the expert before we make a decision.)
|
N/A4
|
|||
Total
|
98
(100.0%)
|
Total
|
355
(100.0%)
|
||
Table
1: The
Distributions of Senses for the verbs
Listen
and
Hear in
WordNet 2.1
Table
1 shows that the verb listen
(to)
has three senses, in which the first sense - hear
with intention
- is most frequently used, constituting 61.2% of the total
instances.5
The second sense of the verb listen
- listen
and pay
attention
(34.7%) - is also found among the senses of the verb hear
(Sense 5), indicating that these two verbs have an overlapping
meaning. The third sense pay
close attention to
is least frequently used - with only 4.1% of the total instances. On
the other hand, the most frequent sense of the verb hear
is perceive
sound via the auditory sense
with a coverage of 77.5% of the total instances displayed in WordNet.
This is followed by the sense get
to know or become aware of
with 16.9% of the total instances. The other senses - with less than
5% each - are hear
evidence by judicial process
and receive
a communication from someone.
However,
since the frequency of the sense listen
and pay attention
(Sense 5) is not available for
the
verb hear,
comparisons between the two verbs cannot be made.
This
analysis shows that these two verbs are near-synonyms, with only one
overlapping
meaning.
Most of the
other meanings are different, which confirms the observations made by
Chung and Ahrens (2008) and Taylor (2003). Cruse (1986: 267) also
states that near-synonyms usually share some “central semantic
traits” but differ in “peripheral traits".6
With
the use of quantitative data, we showed what these traits are. The
next step of our analysis was based on the BNC.
3.2
Step Two: The British National Corpus and the English Sketch Engine
The
search using the English Sketch Engine resulted in 11,096 instances
of listen
appearing as verb forms (present tense, past tense, etc.).7
Hear,
by contrast, has 34,609 instances as different verb forms. The
corpus
data
from the BNC were analyzed in terms of collocations and verb forms,
as reported in the following.
3.2.1
Collocations of Listen
and
Hear.
Based
on corpus data from the BNC, it was found
that listen
almost never appeared in the transitive form as in *I
listen words.
In
fact,
both
Dictionary.com and the Merriam-Webster online
dictionary
define the transitive meaning of listen
as archaic:
Dictionary.com:verb (used with object). Archaic. to give ear to; hear. (http://www.dictionary.com/browse/listen?s=t;18-07- 2017.Merriam-Webster:archaic: to give ear to: hear. (https://www.merriam-webster. com/dictionary/listen; 18-07- 2017)
When
searching for
the
prepositions
of the verb listen
in
the BNC,
we found the following results, which are shown in Table 2:
- WordObserved Collocate FrequencyT-score Valueto602674.35for24210.11with1627.66without183.22outside102.79at692.15through141.86
Table
2: Top prepositions following listen
in the British National Corpus
The
collocation of listen
with the top listed preposition
to
constituted
most of the instances (6,026; 54.5%)
in
the 11,096 instances of listen
as
a verb.8
This
means that most of the
instances
of
the verb listen
were intransitive. Comparatively, hear
appeared in both transitive (I
hear voices.)
and intransitive forms (I
heard from him lately.).
Based on these findings, we compared the objects of listen
(to)
and hear
(instead of listen
and hear)
in the analysis below. Table 3 shows the top 20 collocates under the
grammatical relation of object
for listen
(to)
and hear
based on the results from Sketch Engine. Note that some noun phrases
were not collected in Sketch Engine, as it provides collocates only
at the word level. An example is given in (1) below:
(1) (...) but the number of people that don’t listen to what customers are saying to them
In
Table 3 below, saliency is a measurement of significance in terms of
the collocates used with a certain
word in a certain grammatical relation.9
The
overlapping
objects
(shaded in gray) in the top 20 collocates between listen
(to)
and hear
are story,
sound,
voice,
noise,
and footstep,
which appear in each list.10
- Listen toHearCollocatesFrequencySaliencyCollocatesFrequencySaliencymusic19938.13voice71843.38radio11734.99sound49743.31tape6228.99footstep13742.45report15528.14noise22938.4conversation5426.64scream8236.39story8825.8rumour9434.42sound5522.66news25332.53voice7221.92cry9431.62lecture2420.42shout5030.94word7719.65story22628.62wind3319.62click3528.42noise2719.35word33127.77advice3718.74murmur3027.28song18.46bang3926.56footstep1217.78thud2326.28commentary1217.65bell6325.88speech2917.06whisper3325.77recording1816.91siren2624.93breathing1016.24knock3324.89talk2615.8rustle1724.86
Table
3: Top
20 Collocates for the
object
Relation of
Listen to
and Hear
As also found in the sense analysis in Table 1, perceive sound via the auditory sense was the most frequent sense of hear. Table 3 shows that voice, sound, footstep, and noise appear at the top of the list for hear, but they appear at different positions in the listen-to list. Similarly in Table 1, the most frequent sense of listen (to) was to hear with intention, and this is reflected in the top five objects - music, radio, tape, report, and conversation, which is information that listeners perceive with intention - in Table 1 .11 Furthermore, we also found that many of the objects of hear had a negative meaning (scream, rumour, cry, shout, and siren; in bold, and gunshots, explosion, roar and gunfire, which were not among the top 20 collocates), representing events that occur unexpectedly to the agent. When used with the verb listen to, the unintended meaning is lost, i.e., someone listens to gunshots, an explosion, a roar and gunfire on purpose, which is possible but not usual.
In
fact, as near-synonyms, the verbs
listen
to
and hear
are sometimes used interchangeably in limited contexts where their
meanings
overlap,
such as the substitutable meanings of the verbs listen
to
and
hear
in
Table 3. In examples
such
as listen
to the radio
and hear
on the radio,
the noun radio
denotes the event of broadcasting through the radio
as
a medium, not the physical radio itself. More examples of this are
shown
in
(2) below.
In
these examples, the object (opinion)
and
the noun phrase (what
people are saying)
are underlined:
(2) (a) I would love to listen to the opinion of other readers on this subject. (b) I would love to hear the opinion of other readers on this subject. (c) Before reaching your final decision, you must listen to what people are saying. (d) Before reaching your final decision, you must hear what people are saying.
The
examples in (2) show the same sense for two verbs, and this shared
meaning is also the feature
that defines these two verbs as a near-synonymous set. Unlike the
sentences in (2) above, not all uses of listen
to
and hear
in (3) below are interchangeable. Even
though
the
same object (e.g., story)
appears
with
both verbs, their meanings may not be identical
because
they can be interpreted differently, as shown in (3).
In (3a), listen
to stories
means listen
to narrated stories (with the intention of listening).
By contrast, heard
stories
in example (3b) means receive
messages (probably from unknown sources)
unintentionally:
(3) (a) We used to love to listen to stories about the past of the family.
(b) He had heard many stories about Yanto and knew he was a rough handful.
These
two sentences clearly show a distinctive feature of these two verbs -
intendedness in listen
(to)
is unmarked, while intendedness in hear
is
marked (Battistella 1990). The noun stories
is therefore used in two different senses with listen
to
and hear,
respectively, with (3a) referring to an
account of incidents or events
and
(3b) referring to the metaphorical extension of stories
to mean a
widely circulated rumor
(meanings
taken from Merriam Webster Online, 18-07-2017;
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/story).
In
addition to the examples discussed above, listen
to
and hear
may denote different senses in some other contexts where they become
non-interchangeable. In other words, if the one verb is replaced by
the other one, this may result in a change of meaning
as
shown in (4) below:
(4) (a) You can listen to the radio while you’re working. (b)?You can hear the radio while you’re working. (c) He listened to the screams and bangs coming from Beatrice’s cottage. (d) He heard screams and bangs coming from Beatrice’s cottage.
With
regards to the examples (4a) and (4b), listen
to the radio
does not mean the same as hear
the radio.
These two
uses differ in the intendedness of listen
to,
which is absent in
hear
(i.e., hear
the radio
means that someone hears some information by accident or without the
intention of listening). Example (4c) is acceptable because the
definite article (underlined in the examples) is added before screams
and bangs.
In
this case, listened
to
has an undertone of "intendedness", meaning that the
objects are
definite as the listeners know what they are listening to. By
contrast, the definite article may or may not be
present
in (4d) because hear
does
not have this restriction.
In
(5) below, it is more natural to say (5a)
than
(5b)
because
the adverb attentively
contradicts the unintended meaning of heard:
(5) (a) Helen listened attentively as Sophie revealed her new plan. (b) *Helen heard attentively as Sophie revealed her new plan.
To
further explain the similarities and differences of the two verbs as
displayed in example (7), Table 4 provides the collocational data for
the grammatical relation of modifier
for the verbs listen
(to)
and hear:
- Listen (to)HearCollocatesFrequencySaliencyCollocatesFrequencySaliencyattentively6361.8yesterday28951.1intently7960.8before8639.7carefully20156.9almost7927.9sympathetically1229.3distinctly2026.3politely1528.7clearly5325.9hard2927.8today4125.1patiently1327.4all4425closely2022.8once4624.6please2222.6aright624.4impassively522scarcely1823.4
The data in Table 4 show that the verb listen (to) is followed by adverbials such as attentively, intently, carefully, sympathetically, impassively and closely, most of which show that the listener is in control and how the listening process is conducted, depending on the intention of the listener. Comparatively, the verb hear is usually followed by adverbials in terms of time (yesterday, before, today and once) and manner (distinctly, clearly, aright and scarcely).
Through
Sketch Engine, terms coordinating with listen
(to)
and hear
were also found. Listen
(to) was
found to often collocate with physical bodily actions such as sit,
speak,
talk,
respond,
stand
and
stay
(in boldface), and only one perception verb (look)
is shown in Table 5 (though the list is not exhaustive for listen
(to)).13
On the contrary, hear
only collocates with four verbs only, and two of them are perception
verbs (see
and
smell)
while the other two are mental verbs (determine
and know):
Listen (to)CollocatesFrequencySaliencyCollocatesFrequencySaliencysit4929.4stop1717.0speak2924.4look2916.8talk2422.0wait1215.7learn1919.6stand1213.3respond1218.4stay812.6
HearCollocatesFrequencySaliencyCollocatesFrequencySaliencysee33140.7determine21.019.8smell1524.8know9.05.6
Table
5: Collocates for the
relation
of and/or
for listen
(to)
and hear
Table
5 shows that listen
(to)
and hear
collocate with certain verb types more often than others. The
examples in (6) show some coordinating verbs with listen
(to)
and hear,
respectively:
(6) (a) Children learn to listen and speak through participation in projects. (b) ?Children learn to hear and speak through participation in projects. (c) As a very small child, I’d sit and listen while he read me the comic. (d) ?As a very small child, I’d sit and hear while he read me the comic. (e) ?Jason saw and listened nothing during the night. (f) Jason saw and heard nothing during the night. (g) ?Many elderly people can’t see or listen very well. (h) Many elderly people can’t see or hear very well.
In
(6), some
of
the examples are unnatural when listen
(to)
and hear
are substituted for one another
This, again, can be related to the unintendedness of
hear
because in examples such as (6b) and (6d), it is clear that when the
agents speak
or sit,
their actions are conscious and intended. Therefore,
the combination of hear
and speak
and sit
and hear,
in which an unintended action (hear)
is combined with an intended action (speak/sit),
is grammatical but semantically awkward.
Similarly, when someone saw
and heard nothing
(6f), this means that the hearing process occurred without the
intention of the agent. Nevertheless, the combination of saw
and
listened
in (6e) violates this meaning because it hints at a purposive
listening
process which has no goal (nothing)
and
is therefore contradictory.
A similar interpretation can be applied to (8g) because both
see
and hear
can be unintentional, but the combination of see
or listen
represents a conflict of meaning. In the following section, the
comparisons of verb forms for listen
(to)
and hear
will be examined.
3.2.2
Verb Forms of Listen
(to)
and Hear.
Figure
1 shows how listen
(to)
and hear
may also differ in their verb forms and how these verb forms may
affect the meanings of these two verbs:
Figure 1 shows that compared to hear, listen (to) appeared more frequently in the -ing form (29.3% vs. 6.4%) and in the finite base form (24.3% vs. 8.7%). Examples of these two verb forms are given in (7) below:
(7) (a) The old man and the girl are listening attentively. (b) I kept it up until I was certain you were not hearing a word. (c) Listen to this, listen to this. (d) Now hear this and hear it good.
The
progressive form is usually employed for events which happen
throughout a certain period of time; thus, the verb hear,
which usually denotes an event that happens unexpectedly and
unintendedly, is not commonly found in the -ing
form.
In
contrast,
hear
was encountered more frequently
in
the infinitive,
the past tense and the past participle than listen,
as is exemplified in (8):
(8) (a) Everyone always wanted to listen to what she had to say. (b) We want to hear your views about any issue affecting the countryside. (c) They stood in the darkness behind the door and listened to the foot steps. (d) I heard someone coming towards the door. (e) It is important that the advice of experts should be listened to. (f) The voice of the novelist is heard continually in the speech of his characters.
The
verb
hear
(29.1%) was slightly more frequently in the infinitive form than
listen
(24.6%).
The verb hear
in the past tense constituted 27.6% as compared to the verb
listen in
the past tense (15.2%). As a past participle, heard
was far more frequent (26.9%) than listened
(4.3%). In fact, we found that hear
was
usually followed by nominals (objects) which were negative in meaning
(e.g. (9a) and (9c)). These nominals were often fronted (e.g. (9b)
and (9d)) to emphasize what
was being heard (underlined):
(9) (a) He heard single gunshots from the house.
(b) Occasional gunshots can still be heard.
(c) It was like a nightmare. I heard a loud explosion just to my left.
(d) explosions and mortar bombs were heard intermittently throughout the day.
This
is one of the reasons why the verb
hear
is more frequently used in the passive form than the verb listen
(to).
Some examples of the verb listen
(to) in
the past participle form are given below:
(10) (a) It [music] can be played, listened to, read and written throughout the world… (b) Children also need to be listened to and their point of view understood.
From
the analyses of corpus data based on the British National Corpus
through the Sketch Engine, at least six important differences between
the verbs listen
(to)
and hear
were
identified.
- The verb listen (to) was marked with intendedness while the verb hear was marked with unintendedness
- The verb listen to was most frequently used to indicate that someone hears something with intention (e.g., listen to music / a report / the radio), and the verb hear was frequently used to refer to someone who perceives sound through the auditory sense (e.g., hear a voice / sound / noise).
- Due to the undertone of unintendedness in the verb hear, it often collocated with words that had a negative connotation.
- Since the objects of the verb hear were often negative, they were often fronted and as a result, more uses of past participle were found for he verb hear than for the verb listen (to). Comparatively, more progressive and finite base forms (especially in the imperative) were found for the verb listen (to) because both these forms allow purposive actions to take place with intention.
- In terms of similarities, both verbs were used with objects which denote the production of physical sounds (e.g., music, song, footsteps, breathing, words, etc.).
- In addition, both verbs were used with an event as in the phrases listen to the radio and hear on the radio, in which radio denotes an event rather than the device itself.
3.2.3
Step Three: Teaching the Verbs
Listen to
and Hear
3.2.3.1
Background
On
the basis of our linguistic analysis
of
listen
(to)
and
hear,
we explained the two verbs to a group of students in an English
class. Our purpose was to teach the specific meanings of the two
verbs and explain to students how to distinguish them. The
explanation took about forty minutes and students were tested in the
following week. The following provides the background of the
participants.
Thirty-nine
undergraduate students from a national university in Taiwan
participated in this task. Among these students, 12 were males, and
27 were females. Their average age was 20. The students were either
freshmen or juniors, and they were paid for participating in this
activity.
The
activity
consisted of a writing task and a subsequent vocabulary test.
Students were asked to write a 100- to 150-word paragraph based on a
series of four pictures adapted from the picture book
Frog,
Where Are You? (Mayer
et al. 1969). This story
is
about a boy searching for his pet frog, in which the third picture
(Figure 2)
illustrates
the boy putting his hand near his ear to search for the sound of the
frog. Based on this illustration, students were expected to use
either listen
(to)
or hear
to describe this particular picture, and their language patterns were
collected and examined.
Picture
1 (Mayer et al. 1969, 1)
Picture 2 (Mayer et al. 1969: 3)
Picture
3 (Mayer et al. 1969: 23)
Picture
4 (Mayer et al. 1969: 27)
Figure
2: Pictures Taken
Frog,
Where Are You? (Mayer
et al. 1969)
The
task began with a questionnaire about students’ personal
information and language background. The main writing task, which
included the instructions on the first page, the pictures on the
second page, and a blank sheet of paper on the third page, was then
distributed to students. The instructions were also explained by the
instructor in Mandarin so as
to
ensure that students were clear about the task. Before the writing
task began, students were allowed to ask questions for clarification
regarding the task. After making sure that all the instructions were
clear to students, the instructor
then
asked them to turn to the second page. Students were told to focus on
the actions of the boy without being informed about the real purpose
of the task. They then turned to the third page and started the
writing task.
The
whole process took about 50 minutes, and the writing task was
completed within 30 minutes. After finishing the writing task, all
the students received a vocabulary test, which was adapted from the
vocabulary
test by Redman (2002).
There
were ten multiple-choice questions on the test, and each question was
accorded a score of ten points.
Students
were asked
to
hand in the test after five minutes.
The
vocabulary test was used as a reference in addition to collecting
students’
self-reported
English
proficiency scores at the beginning of the activity (students had
rated their own ability and provided their previous official
examination scores or their English scores recognized by the
university before their admission).
3.2.3.2
Results
The
mean of
students’
self-rated
Mandarin
proficiency was 6.8 on a scale ranging from 1 to 7, with 1 being the
least proficient and 7 being the most proficient. The
mean
of students’ self-rated English proficiency was 4.6 The initial
questionnaire also collected students’ self-reported scores on
their English Basic Competency Test (BCT) for Junior High School
Students and
their
Joint
College Entrance Examination (JCEE). These scores were used as
references to determine whether students should be dropped due to low
English proficiency. The results showed that no student was
dropped
due to low English proficiency.
For
the writing task, the instructor then transcribed all the writing
samples into text files.
The files were then run, using the AntConc Concordancer (Anthony
2005) to
search for [listen*]
and [hear*].15
Six
out of the 39 students did not use the two verbs, mainly because they
skipped the boy’s
action in the third picture. They may have thought that this picture
carried less important information
than the
other pictures. Ten students used both
verbs listen
(to)
and hear,
while the others used only one of the two verbs. Two examples are
given in (11)16:
(11) (a) Listen! I think I heard something. (S006) (b) Therefore, he decided to search for it by listening to the frog’s sounds…. Suddenly, he heard some sounds from the timber on his left side. (S026)
In
total, 15 instances (28.8%) of the verb listen
(to) and
37 instances (71.2%) of the verb hear
were
found. Therefore
given the
picture with the boy putting his
hand near his ear, students used
more
instances of hear
than listen
(to).
Uses of both verbs are documented in (12):
(12) (a) The little boy puts his hand near his ear to hope to listen more clearly. (S008) (b) Tom was listening to the sounds the frog produced. (S026) (c) They heard a voice of the frog. (S009) (d) Suddenly, he heard some voices. (S015)
The
examples in (12) match those
from the above analysis, regarding the unintended meaning of the verb
hear,
which
indicates that
students
were familiar with these two verbs.
The
higher percentage of the verb hear
was, however, predictable
because, as shown in
the previous analyses,
the verb hear
is more suitable for contexts expressing unintendedness, and the
picture elicited a higher
number of unintended uses.
Among the students, 28.8% still
preferred the intended use of listen
(to)
compared with hear,
as in (12a) and (12b), both of which are purposive actions.
Therefore,
based on
this activity, we found the uses of listen
(to)
and hear
that were preferred by students when
prompted by a picture.
Most
students chose
to use hear
to increase the suddenness of events in the story. For the verb
listen
(to),
all of the instances
(except
one imperative) were intransitive. Hear,
on the other
hand, collocated with only three types of objects in the 37
instances, namely noise
(3; 8.10%), sound
(22; 59.46%), and voice
(12; 32.43%). Among these, only eight instances
(21.60%) were used with
adjectives (slight,
noisy,
strange,
delightful,
and familiar).
We
had hoped that,
at the undergraduate level, students would provide more sophisticated
combinations when using these two verbs than they actually did.
To
compare the results from the three resources, the distributions of
the various meanings are presented in Table 6 below:
WordNet
|
BNC
|
|||||
Listen
(to)
|
WordNet
2.1 Senses
|
Freq.
(%)
|
Freq.
(%)
|
Freq.
(%)
|
||
1
|
Hear
with intention. (e.g., Listen
to the sound of this cello.)
|
60
(61.2%)
|
115
(23.0%)
|
14
(93.3%)
|
||
2
|
Listen
and pay attention. (e.g., Listen
to your father.)
|
34
(34.7%)
|
321
(64.2%)
|
1
(6.7%)
|
||
3
|
Pay
close attention to. (e.g., Listen
to the advice of the old man.)
|
4
(4.08%)
|
48
(9.6%)
|
N/A
|
||
Others
|
N/A
|
16
(3.2%)
|
N/A
|
|||
Total
|
98
(100.0%)
|
500
(100.0%)
|
15
(100.0%)
|
|||
WordNet
|
BNC
|
Student
Writing
|
||||
Hear
|
WordNet
2.1 Senses
|
Freq.
(%)
|
Freq.
(%)
|
Freq.
(%)
|
||
1
|
Perceive
sound via the auditory sense.
|
275
(77.5%)
|
156
(31.2%)
|
37(100.0%)
|
||
2
|
Get
to know or become aware of, usually accidentally. (e.g., I
heard that you have been promoted.)
|
60
(16.9%)
|
278
(55.6%)
|
N/A
|
||
3
|
Hear
evidence by judicial process. (e.g., The
jury had heard all the evidence.)
|
12
(3.4%)
|
18
(3.6%)
|
N/A
|
||
4
|
Receive
a communication from someone. (e.g., We
heard nothing from our son for five years.)
|
8
(2.3%)
|
14
(2.8%)
|
N/A
|
||
5
|
Listen
and pay attention. (e.g., We
must hear the expert before we make a decision.)
|
N/A
|
28
(5.6%)
|
N/A
|
||
Total
|
355
(100%)
|
500
(100%)
|
37
(100%)
|
|||
Table
6: Distribution of senses in data from WordNet, BNC, and the writing
task
To
summarize the analysis of the writing
task, we can say that most
of the students were able to distinguish the near-synonym pair listen
(to)
and hear
and use each of them in
appropriate contexts when guided. They used the verb listen
(to)
so as to
emphasize that something was paid close
attention
to and the verb hear
to describe someone perceiving a sound, although the addition of
adverbs may have made the unintentionality more subtle.
4
Discussion and Conclusion
In
this paper, corpus data were used to examine the verbs listen
(to)
and hear
in
terms of their similarities and differences, as well as their
semantic and syntactic distributional patterns. Similar to listen
(to),
the verb hear
can also be used to describe that something is being paid attention
to. However, such use was not frequently found in the native-speaker
data, as native English speakers generally use the verb hear
to refer to the act of perceiving a given sound via the auditory
sense.
The
linguistic analysis that we have carried out in this study has the
potential to increase the awareness of English teachers, whose job
generally comprises the explanation of different
word
meanings
to students.
As
Hunston & Feng (2002: 3) noted, teachers tend to teach language
based on their own intuition, without providing a better explanation
regarding the question of why
a certain phrase is more appropriate in a particular context than in
another one. Alternatively, by using a corpus, teachers can help
learners gain access to a great amount of data, which can be
processed and presented by “showing frequency, phraseology, and
collocation” (Hunston & Feng 2002: 3). Our results can
provide students
with information about the distribution of lexical items (i.e., which
senses of a word - like the verbs listen
(to) and
hear
- are most frequently used or which verb forms are highest in
percentage). This information will be valuable to language teachers
because it provides the linguistic behaviors of the words compared.
Acknowledgements
This
study was conducted under research grants from the Ministry of
Science and Technology, Taiwan: 104-2420-H-004-034-MY2 and
106-2410-H-004-109-MY2. The author would like to thank the anonymous
reviewers and the editor of JLLT for commenting on the previous
version of this article. Tzu-Yun Tseng's help on the
previous version was also appreciated.
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Author:
Siaw-Fong Chung,
Ph.D.
Associate
Professor
Department
of English
National Chengchi University
No. 64, Sec. 2, ZhiNan Road
Taipei City 11605, Taiwan
National Chengchi University
No. 64, Sec. 2, ZhiNan Road
Taipei City 11605, Taiwan
1 The
preposition to is sometimes needed to establish listen as a
near-synonym with hear. As such, we can already predict that these
two verbs are not perfect synonyms because they differ
syntactically. A more in-depth analysis will be provided in later
sections of this paper.
2 WordNet
is
a lexical database that provides the semantic relations (such as
synonyms, antonyms, hypernyms, and hyponyms) of lexical items. It is
available at http://wordnet.princeton.edu/.
The term
sense
refers to the meaning entry listed in WordNet. Since our analysis of
the meanings of listen
(to)
and hear
is based on their senses, the terms sense
and meaning
are used interchangeably in this article.
3 The
British National Corpus is a 100-million-word collection of written
and spoken texts. For more information, cf.
http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/.
4 When
“N/A” is shown, it is either because this sense never occurred
in the corpora or because this sense was added after the sense
analysis had been carried out.
5 The
total numbers in Table 1 were computed by the authors, who assumed
that the respective frequency for each sense also reflected the
total number of tokens found for listen
and hear
in the two corpora examined.
6 However,
as shown in Table 1, the “central” trait may not be the most
frequent trait.
7 Listen
and listen
to
are both near-synonyms of the verb hear,
but in some corpora, the search for listen to is not allowed (such
as the search for collocations in Sketch Engine).
8 An
asterisk (*)
serves as a wildcard to extract any verb forms beginning with listen
(to) and
hear
(including -ing,
-ed,
etc.). However, when an asterisk is used in an example sentence,
such as *I
listen music,
this means that the sentence is grammatically incorrect. A question
mark appearing before a sentence means that the sentence is
unnatural but not ungrammatical.
9 However,
saliencies are list-independent and, thus, cannot be compared across
lists (such as between listen
(to) and
hear),
but they do indicate the rank of importance among the collocates in
the same list.
10 The
total number of collocates for the objects of hear
does not amount to 34,609, which is the total number of instances
for hear
in the whole British National Corpus, because some instances of hear
were intransitive.
11 Therefore,
it can also be postulated that sense frequency can be obtained by
observing the ranking of the collocates, which is arranged according
to saliency. Predicting sense frequency is an interesting area of
research that can be carried out through collocational analyses.
12 The
collocates in Tables 3 and 4 can apply to both listen
and listen
to. Thus,
the notation listen
(to)
is used in the titles and respective columns of both tables.
14
The
results
in Figure 1 only provide the forms of the verbs (e.g., listening,
listened).
We still do not know how many of these verb forms are used with to
(e.g., listening
to
vs. listening;
listened
to
vs. listened).
15 See
footnote 8
for
the use of asterisks. As the asterisk is a wildcard, the search
might return irrelevant results such as the form heart.
Irrelevant results
were
removed manually. Noun forms such as listener
were also excluded
in
our results because only the verbs were included for further
analysis.
As
the texts were written by students, they may contain some language
errors.