<em>Lexical Phrases and Language Teaching</em> by James R. Nattinger and Jeanette S. DeCarrico. Oxford University Press, 1992. xiii + 218 pp.

Abstract

Lexical Phrases and Language Teaching by James R. Nattinger and Jeanette S. DeCarrico. Oxford University Press, 1992. xiii + 218pp. Reviewed by David Leech University of California, Los Angeles Studies from various traditions of natural language research into socially institutionalized, and thereby lexicalized, phraseology (i.e., lexical-grammatical collocations) have been of increasing interest to some applied linguists. Such phraseology ranges from fixed expressions (idioms) with high semantic opacity (noncompositionality) and high structural invariability to relatively variable and transparent expressions. The theoretical background to the 'lexical phrases' (LPs) referred to in the title of Nattinger & DeCarrico's recent book, Lexical Phrases and Language Teaching, is introduced in their very useful and fairly complete literature survey of Chapter 1. 'Lexical phrases' are held by the authors to be locatable along a form/function continuum (Chapter 1) of expressions, which they analyze according to the following criteria: 'canonical' versus 'non-canonical shape' (having one of the typical shapes of English structures ), idiomaticity, as defined above, and pragmatic illocutionary (speech act) or cohesive discourse function. The authors then present some classification lists, their categories culled from various sources: a functional (speech act) list and a [text-]organizational (i.e., metalanguage, cf Vande Kopple, 1989) list. Unfortunately, it is not made clear how these schemes might relate systematically to constitute LPs in support of the authors' implicit, unsubstantiated claim that the form and function continua are somehow parallel, inseparable, or identical. The authors then propose a catalog of LPs in Chapter 2 derived from these schemes. This catalog contains a mixture of formal and functional classifications, which, it is claimed, move from 'frozen' toward freely compositional and productive (p. 178) utterances: polywords such as once and for all (a summarizer in this case), institutionalized expressions such as nice meeting you, phrasal Issues in Applied Linguistics © Regents of the University of California ISSN 1050-4273 Vol. 5 No. 1 1994 160-165