English lesson
Our next part of the body is chest. However, this word does not always refer to a body part, as you can see from the most frequent adjectives that collocate with it:
| 1 | BARE | 148 |
| 2 | UPPER | 90 |
| 3 | BROAD | 85 |
| 4 | HIGH | 67 |
| 5 | WOODEN | 41 |
| 6 | HAIRY | 36 |
| 7 | FLAT | 33 |
| 8 | LOWER | 33 |
| 9 | SMALL | 31 |
| 10 | MUSCULAR | 30 |
| 11 | BONY | 28 |
| 12 | NARROW | 28 |
| 13 | SEVERE | 28 |
| 14 | BIG | 23 |
| 15 | MASSIVE | 22 |
| 16 | OPEN | 22 |
| 17 | NAKED | 21 |
| 18 | THICK | 21 |
| 19 | THIN | 20 |
| 20 | AMPLE | 19 |
- Detail showing the knee return of a high chest of drawers attributed to Elijah Sanderson.
- This high chest of drawers, originally a lingerie chest, serves a useful purpose in the dining room.
wooden
- One was a wooden chest with a heart and two doves carved on the lid.
- Police begin searching for a wooden chest and a suitcase that witnesses say they saw Sylvester carrying from his apartment…
- The tapes are in the wooden chest.
As you can see, in the cases above, chest is a piece of furniture.
With open things are a bit different. In the first example, what we actually have is a longer collocation open chest surgery:
- But because this is open chest surgery, it’s a much more difficult procedure.
In the following ones, we go back to a piece of furniture:
- In the inmost chamber of her apartments, Artemisia stood over an open chest and selected one item of clothing after another.
- Irene remained standing beside the open chest of drawers.
Another adjective that calls our attention is severe. What could be a “severe chest”? Can you figure it out? Let’s look at the examples:
- Ford fainted while at work; then awoke with severe chest pains.
- He was hospitalized for three nights with a severe chest cold.
- If you’re having difficulty breathing, severe chest pain, inability to take anything by mouth, food or liquid, then absolutely
That’s it, severe collocates with the noun that comes after chest: pain(s), cold. So we have severe pain(s) and severe cold. But, the pain(s) and cold come from the chest.
The meaning of the other collocations seems to be quite literal. Here are a few:
flat
- … so she crossed her arms over her flat chest and said, “I’m going to be a child forever.
- No flat chest, hairy as a man’s or smooth as a boy’s, was revealed.
- She was wearing a red felt Santa pin on her flat chest.
- He could see the rapid rise and fall of the small chest. The boy was alive.
- The sadness in her heart dwindled and her small chest heaved gently with a sigh.
- Michael hurried home and dragged out the small chest where he kept all of his ill-gotten gains.
- The cloth was creased as if it had been folded in a small chest for months.
Now let’s look at the 20 most frequent nouns that follow chest:
| 1 | PAIN | 479 |
| 2 | PAINS | 244 |
| 3 | X-RAY | 209 |
| 4 | HAIR | 118 |
| 5 | WALL | 105 |
| 6 | CAVITY | 96 |
| 7 | MUSCLES | 83 |
| 8 | X-RAYS | 67 |
| 9 | HEAVING | 61 |
| 10 | HEIGHT | 61 |
| 11 | LEVEL | 61 |
| 12 | COMPRESSIONS | 58 |
| 13 | PRESS | 51 |
| 14 | AREA | 45 |
| 15 | ROSE | 44 |
| 16 | 42 | |
| 17 | WOUND | 40 |
| 18 | TIGHTNESS | 39 |
| 19 | DISCOMFORT | 37 |
| 20 | RADIOGRAPH | 36 |
In all of these collocations chest is a body part, as you will see below, and most collocations are somehow related to the medical field.
The most common nominal collocation with chest as the base (main word) is chest pain(s) with a total of 723 occurrences. And the meaning is very clear, as is the meaning of most of the other collocations.
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Chest pain |
Chest x-ray(s) and chest radiographs are the same thing, but chest x-ray(s) are much more frequently used: 276 occurrences against only 36 for chest radiograph.
- Two weeks later, a chest X-ray showed a mild pneumonia.
- A chest x-ray showed normal lung fields.
- Chest x-rays revealed a buildup of fluid around his lungs.
- But chest X-rays often won’t catch the smallest early-stage tumors.
- A chest radiograph was normal, with no evidence of adenopathy or interstitial lung disease.
- A chest radiograph showed multifocal consolidation with possible underlying background of pulmonary edema
If we look down the list we’ll see a few more medical collocations:
chest tightness
- They focus on a constellation of commonly accepted and recognised respiratory symptoms, such as chest tightness, wheeze, cough and breathlessness
- The 10-year-old girl also experienced chest tightness and shortness of breath following an injection on day 77 of therapy.
- Early symptoms of an asthma attack include chest tightness, wheezing, and shortness of breath.
chest discomfort
- It still may make sense if angina (bouts of chest discomfort caused by a lack of blood flow to the heart) interferes with daily activities.
- The classic symptom is chest discomfort. I don’t say “pain,” because many people say it’s not pain, but discomfort. It’s often felt as a pressure or a squeezing sensation in the center of the chest.
chest compressions
- …no more mouth-to-mouth as first response, just chest compressions.
- It took doctors over forty-five hundred chest compressions and eight shocks from a defibrillator to stabilize him and give him his life back.
- Currently, that involves mouth-to-mouth breathing followed by a series of chest compressions.
chest wound
How do you like this picture of a chest wound? Quite ugly, isn’t it? But don’t worry, it’s all fake, it’s make-up!
But the examples are real:
- Stan’s chest wound was bubbling frothy blood, and wheezing sounds came from his mouth.
- Azrael clutches at his sucking chest wound, dropping to his knees.
Suddenly a word catches our attention: heaving.
- His back was to the wall, his chest heaving, as he braced himself for the worst
- The child stood still, his narrow chest heaving.
- Without warning Elcott began to cry, his face crumpled and his chest heaving.
Heaving is actually a verb here and should not have appeared onthe list. The same is true for rose, which is also a verb, as you can see below:
- His chest rose and fell.
- Her chest rose and fell quickly.
- Wylie’s chest rose and fell in heavy breaths.
As you may know, the COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English – www.americancorpus.org), which is the source of all our examples, is a POS-tagged corpus, that is each word has a POS (part-of-speech) label. But this tagging is automatic, so mistakes may occur. This is absolutely normal, and expected to a certain extent, because these taggers usually have a 97% rate of accuracy, so… 3% may be mistakes and we just hit on two of them!!! But this can be corrected if the coordinator of the corpus is informed.
OK, but enough with the medical field! Let’s move on and work out some other examples.
Chest height and chest level seem to be quite similar:
- Clasp each other’s hands at chest height in front of you
- Holding dumbbells at chest height, press them straight up, then lower.
- They had a technique of holding the apple at chest height and slicing it at lightning speed into such thin slices that it hardly needed chewing.
- Bend left elbow and raise arm to chest level.
- Pointing his carbine at chest level, Hans pushed his way into the room.
If you want to get a muscular chest¸do the chest press:
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| Chest Press |
To complete our collocations for this month, here is a very easy one:
- Father Andrew slid his glasses back into his chest pocket.
- I was terribly afraid, and reached into my chest pocket for something to throw.
If you want to have some fun, try matching the adjectival collocations we have seen in the first part of this post with the most common adjectives that co-occur with “peito” in Portuguese (below). Not all of them will match, though!
| NU | BARE |
| ABERTO | UPPER |
| CHEIO | BROAD |
| ARQUEJANTE | HIGH |
| ESQUERDO | WOODEN |
| DESENCARNADO | HAIRY |
| ALTO | FLAT |
| MAGRO | LOWER |
| OPRESSO | SMALL |
| AMPLO | MUSCULAR |
| AMIGO | BONY |
| FORTE | NARROW |
| CAVERNOSO | SEVERE |
| ARQUEADO | BIG |
| CABELUDO | MASSIVE |
| CHATO | OPEN |
| MORTO | NAKED |
| ROBUSTO | THICK |
| ILUSTRE | THIN |
| OSSUDO | AMPLE |
OK, guys! We’re approaching the end of this post, but before that I need to get something off my chest: we got a bit technical this month, but working with corpora is like this… what you see is what you get!
So, to make things a bit easier for you, here a little bonus:
So, to make things a bit easier for you, here a little bonus:
| Chest cavity – cavidade torácica |
| Chest discomfort – desconforto no peito |
| Chest muscles – músculos do peito |
| Chest pain – dor no peito |
| Chest press – máquina de supino vertical |
| Chest tightness – aperto no peito |
| Chest wall – parece torácica |
| Chest wound – ferimento / ferida no peito |
| Chest x-ray / radiograph – raio X / radiografia de tórax |
| Open chest surgery – cirurgia de peito aberto |
| Severe chest pain – forte dor no peito |
See you next month!!
Stella
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Stella E. O. Tagnin professora associada do Departamento de Letras Modernas, FFLCH, da USP. Embora aposentada, continua orientando em nível de pós-graduação nas áreas de Tradução, Terminologia, Ensino e Aprendizagem, sempre com base na Lingüística de Corpus. É coordenadora do Projeto CoMET.e-mail: seotagni@usp.br.
