From phraseology to pedagogy: Challenges and prospects

John Sinclair’s model of language is firmly centred on a contextual approach to meaning capable of accounting for “the contextually sensitive relationships that are contracted in actual text” (Sinclair 2004a: 278). This approach stands in sharp contrast to semantic models that view meaning as inherent in words, a view which Sinclair considers incapable of doing justice to the richness of meaning: « The subtelty and flexibility of meaning that is so characteristic of its everyday use is regularized and sanitised to make the words stable nodes in a network that is far removed from their textual origins » (ibid: 278). By contrast, in Sinclair’s contextual approach to meaning, « A word may have many potential meanings, but its actual meaning in any authentic written or spoken text is determined by its context: its collocations, structural patterns, and pragmatic functions » (Krishnamurthy 2006).