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16 (968-1031)

Amy B M Tsui

When the teacher was teaching, they listened to the walkman.

Or When the teacher was teaching, they listened to walkman.

One TELEC staff member responded by pointing out that the definite arti-
cle the is used when referring to systems of communication or mass media,
such as the radio, the telephone and the mail. He observed that the use of
the is a bit variable in television because a search through the corpus showed
instances of television, with and without the. For example,

[Concordance J]
I watched the television last night and was gripped by the horror and . . .
Jazz was watching the television. . .
. .an enjoyable play on the television . . .
to get some exciting bands on the television. . .
week and is also permitted to watch television at certain hours. His
er with a blanket and went to watch television. But when she checked on
Yes. 1. Well, did you (um) watch television the other night when

The question about walkman is a bit more problematic. There is not a single
instance of walkman in the MEC. The TELEC staff introspected that because
walkman is in fact a brand name which has been generalized to refer to any
small portable cassette player rather than a system of communication, the ten-
dency would be to use it as an ordinary countable noun, and therefore the
indefinite article a or a possessive pronoun would be used. He conducted a
further search on the Cobuild corpus and found 28 instances of walkman.
The corpus data confirmed his introspection.

Rationalization of collocations

The third type of frequently asked question has to do with rationalization of

collocations. Teachers often try to look for rules governing which words can
go with certain words and why. For example, the following is a message from
Teacher 8 asking whether one can say well-experienced.
If we say someone is experienced, we mean this person has certain knowl-
edge or expertise. Do we have well-experienced as well? If so, does it
mean there is an even higher level of expertise?

One of the TELEC staff who is a native speaker of English replied as follows:
I couldnt make up my mind about well-experienced. We say well-
educated, well-brought-up etc. So why shouldnt we say well-experienced?
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What teachers have always wanted to know

However, one minute it sounded OK but the next it didnt so I looked it

up in the corpus.
There werent any examples of well-experienced at all. To express an even
higher level of expertise, the examples from the corpus showed that peo-
ple use adverbs such as very and vastly but these dont seem to be very
common. . . .
Mind you, . . . , even if there is such a word as well-experienced, Im now
not so sure that it means more than experienced. Similarly, is a well-
educated person more educated than an educated one?

A search conducted on the MEC in TeleCorpora on the word experienced

showed that there are 105 instances of experienced used as an adjective. There
are only 25 instances where experienced was modified by intensifiers like
very, supremely, vastly and by comparatives and superlatives like more
and most.
A further search was conducted on the BNC on experienced and yielded
8 instances of well experienced.

[Concordance K]
the intention being (and Dudek was very well experienced in this sort of work) for him to take
As a rule, the examining doctor will be well experienced in dealing with sexual symptoms
Firms which are well experienced in overseas employee transfers often
to be numerous and very well armed though how well experienced?
A life science graduate already well experienced as a CRA, you should ideally have
encouragingly, our Export Department is well experienced and appears to be well placed to
ever worked in pubs; CVs of head chefs well experienced in take-aways; you read the CV of
I mean as you as you say, Nicks a long serving and well experienced reliable

To investigate whether there is any difference in the behavior between expe-

rienced and other adjectives that take well as the modifier, a search was
conducted on well in the BNC and it yielded the following compound adjec-
tives: well qualified, well educated, well organized, well equipped, and
well-known. To see whether the rare occurrence of experienced being pre-
modified by the adverb well has to do with the semantics of experienced, a
search was conducted on the modifying adverbs, highly, very, poorly and
badly. The following are the results of the search (see Table 2).
The figures in Table 2 show that there are several ways in which expe-
rienced behaves differently from the other five adjectives. First, despite the
fact that well experienced is found in the BNC, its occurrence is far fewer