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begin with lexical items and show how they need to be grammatically modified to be communicatively effective.β At around the same time, research using language corpora was highlighting the combinatory power, and ultimate learning potential, of grammar words (or functors), such as auxiliaries, determiners, prepositions, pronouns and conjunctions. As Sinclair and Renouf (1988: 155) pointed out, βEnglish makes excessive use, e.g. through phrasal verbs, of its most frequent words, and so they are well worth learning.β And they add, βverb tenses, for example, which are often the main organizing feature of a course, are combinations of some of the commonest words in the language.β This suggests to me that there are two
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