Looking at round

The word round can mean different things. This activity encourages the learner to examine their own awareness of the word and its meanings, think about way to classify words/this word, learn about parts-of-speech, and practise word-order.

• Write five sentences which all include the word round. Make sure you have at least three different meanings. (if you cannot think of three meanings, look up round in a dictionary ).
• Can you classify your examples in any way? Can you think of different ways to classify them?
• Which use do you think is most common?
• Look at your sentences again. What part-of-speech is round?

• Look up round in the BNC using the Word query function. [Illustration: 'round']
  • How many different parts-of-speech (POS) does it have (click on ‘round’ in the top window and examine the result in the lower window)?
  • Which POS is most frequent?
  • What word classes can you find in the corpus that you did not use in your examples? (vice versa?)
  • Can you find an example when ‘round’ is a proper noun? (click on NP0 in the lower window and then on the Query button to see a list of examples) [Illustration: 'round' as proper noun (NP0)].

Up: Contents Previous: Adverbs modifying adjectives: very difficult?