Introdungcing English language part 37: 'In this exciting new textbook, Louise Mullany and Peter Stockwell have provided a fresh and imaginative set of alternatives for teaching and learning a huge amount about the English language. The book allows tor creative and lateral approaches to developing an understanding of important linguistic concepts and, together with the thought-provoking activities, and accessible readings, guarantees there is something to stimulate every learner. | D2 202 EXTENSION LINGUISTIC READINGS John Sinclair meaning it is surely there that we should look. A typical idiom in English is built around naked eye. . We shall examine in detail the expression naked eye. There is no useful interpretation for this phrase based on the core meanings of the two words . unclothed organ of sight although we can work back from the phrasal meaning roughly without the aid of a telescope or microscope and make a metaphorical extension to naked which fits the meaning. Notice that once established it is dangerously easy to reverse the procedure and assume that the metaphorical extension is obvious. It is not naked in the collocation naked eye could equally well mean unprotected without eyelids without spectacles contact lenses etc. and the collocation naked eye could easily mean shocked they stripped in front of the naked eyes of the watchers or provocative espionage device American use of their naked eye spy satellites has caused Iraq to retaliate or a dozen other metaphorical extensions of the semantic features of the two words involved. The data analysed for this study comes from The Bank of English which contained in mid-1995 a total of 211 million words of current English from a wide range of sources. There are 151 instances of naked eye . . By inspection of the concordances it is clear that there is greater consistency of patterning to the left of the collocation than to the right so we move in our study step by step to the left. . . . The first position to the left of naked eye designated N-1 is occupied by the word the in 95 per cent of the examples. The deviant examples are explained as the influence of regular features of English - the concord of personal pronouns and the nominalization of noun phrases. Therefore it is established that the is an inherent component of the phrase the naked eye. We now turn to position N-2 immediately to the left of the. Two words dominate the pattern - with and to . you can see with the naked .
