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- Selected collocations in English: contributions to Business English fluencyPublication . Fanha Martins, HélderThe collocations in this text have been selected to make it as useful and easy to use as possible for learners of English. A special effort has been made to identify and incorporate collocations that are used in the business area, thus, contributing to a better business English fluency. The collocations presented here were selected from those identified as significant from multiple sources: The CANCODE Corpus of Spoken English, The Cambridge International Corpus of Written and Spoken English, The Cambridge Learner Corpus, the British National Corpus, the BBI Dictionary of English Word Combinations, the Collins COBUILD English Dictionary, the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, the Oxford Dictionary of English Idioms, the Longman Dictionary of English Collocations, and Tom Cobb’s LexTutor Concordance System (http://www.lextutor.ca/).
- The economy principle: 17 characteristics that make the English language economical…in comparison to Portuguese – a pedagogical perspectivePublication . Fanha Martins, Hélder; Carvalho-Oliveira, José ManuelABSTRACT We believe that all languages in the world use the Economy Principle in some way or other. The principle states that “languages tend to express ideas as economically as possible”. This means that the speaker tends to leave out unnecessary words and not to repeat concepts that have been previously expressed. In the Portuguese language, such expressions as “recuar para trás”, “ambos os dois”, and “preferir antes” are justifiably viewed as poor, since they unnecessarily repeat ideas (“para trás” is implied in “recuar”, “ambos” includes the idea of “os dois”, “preferir” encompasses the concept of “antes”). This type of expressions is anti-economical, and grammar books classify them as pleonasms, i.e. redundancies. English is so easy to learn by foreigners partly because it is one of the languages that most efficiently use the economy principle. In this brief note, we present several perspectives that justify the previous statements, with examples from English and Portuguese.