Do you practice good hygiene?
Good hygiene practices and the use of Dettol have proven to reduce illness in children by up to 75%. Instinctively, as a native speaker of English , I know that something is not right. It has never occurred to me once that reduce could collocate with illness. Based on the results obtained from the Cobuild Concordance sampler, what was observed was that there were many of words like “fatal, disability, chronic, terminal, mental, serious” collocating with the word illness. These words fall under the syntactic category of adjectives. There were no instances of a verb collocating with illness based on the cobuild concordance sampler.
The what about the word reduce? Based on the list of sentence fragments provided, we can make a general hypothesis that reduce is often used in sentences where the meaning takes on a negative sense. Hence, the word appears often finds itself collocating with NP with a negative meaning or something undesirable.This is evident in the concordance sampler.
1.) To reduce environmental pollutions
2.) Reduce incidence of alcohol-related crime
3.) Reduce stress
4.) Reduce frequency of racial attacks,
5.) Reduce burgulary in London
6.) Reduce the risk of transmission
Yet , I wish to highlight that this is not representative of all sentences in the English language. Of course, another hypothesis could be that the NP has to be a quantifier if reduce were to collocate with the NP. Therefore, we can generate sentences like
1.) Reduce the number of papers in his workroom
2.) Reduce my burden
3.) Reduce his pocket money
4.) reduce bleeding, period pain and PMT.
5.) reduce the number of hospital beds
6.) Reduce the intake of total dietary fat
Based on the first hypothesis, reduce can collocate with illness . Based on the second hypothesis, reduce can still collocate with illnesses, because we can think of the word illness as a noun possessing having quantity. If so, then reduce illness should be perfectly fine but why does my intuition tell me it is wrong? Ah, but I think I know where the problem lies. The word is in its singular form illness. But supposedly if I were to say illnesses, does not improve things? Not really! Reduce illnesses still pose a problem! Someone please enlighten me to this!
Perhaps my analysis is not very detailed? Perhaps I have to spend more time pondering over this? Perhaps my hypothesis is wrong? Frankly , I feel that prevent should take the place of the word reduce. So the ad should say, GOOD HYGIENE AND THE USE OF DETTOL HELP TO PREVENT ILLNESSES.
Going back to the concordance sampler, we see that the word prevent collocates with illnesses.
Moreover, we observe that there is a great number of instances of the word prevent collocating with words like ‘ infection, bleeding, constipations, cancers, blindness, dehydration” which all fall under the category of illnesses. As for the word reduce , we get collocations like “ reduce inflammations, risks, puffiness, stress, discharge, fertility, discharge”.
So based on this extra set of data, I am going to generate a 3rd hypothesis to explain why is it that reduce does not seem to collocate with illness. Looking at the above data, notice that the lexical items which are grouped under the category of illnesses are collocated with prevent. Whereas, inflammations, puffiness, discharge (vaginal ?) , fertility do not seem to fall under such a category.
Hence this explains why reduce illness does not seem to hold. The constrain here is the domain or category of words which are classified beneath it. What are your thoughts then? Do I seem to make much sense or not?