John -

 

I suspect that with that sentence - and with many, many others in
English-language newspapers - your students are having trouble with
"chunking" and interpretation partly because they will tend to approach
idiomatic language literally. As a native English-speaker, I read "with
an eye to" almost as a single element, and so "eye" in that expression
doesn't have the same list of alternate choices as "eye" used normally
does.  One limitation of what we might call "plain vanilla RK" is that
it has no device for indicating the status of idioms as idioms, although
it isn't difficult to tweak it to do so.

 

Bill Spruiell

Dept. of English

Central Michigan University 


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