[Vocabulary] Give (V) + Pressure (N)?

englishteacher79 · Sep 6, 2014

Can you use "give" with "pressure" as in "My father gives me a lot of pressure." I know the most common collocation is put pressure on someone. I searched google and there was a lot of instances of "give" "pressure" together. However, I searched COCA corpus and could hardly find that combination.

Thanks.

Raymott · Sep 6, 2014

It's not common. Actually, I think the most common collocation would be "apply pressure" (perhaps not to people), but you can check that.
I'd say, "My father pressures me a lot".

BobK · Sep 6, 2014

You're right to say that put is the most common collocation for pressure. As you've already looked in COCA I'll give you the results of my search in BNC (to show you that this is not a British anomaly. BNC reports 250 collocations, but only these 10 have 20 or more hits:

1 PUT PRESSURE 194
2 INCREASING PRESSURE 83
3 PUTTING PRESSURE 67
4 IS PRESSURE 45
5 EXERT PRESSURE 35
6 GROWING PRESSURE 33
7 BRING PRESSURE 32
8 BE PRESSURE 24
9 APPLY PRESSURE 20
10 PEER PRESSURE 20

(and some of those are irrelevant - e.g. 'peer' can be a verb, which is why BNC lists it [although in this instance it is an adjective]).

Here's a link for my search. There is one hit for 'give pressure':

...we're already under pressure to give names, and we are reluctant to give pressure, cos n-- [BK - sic] reluctant to give names because we haven't got them...

This looks to me like a flakey transcription, or a verbatim report of a slip of the tongue.

Don't be led to think that all those Google hits indicate anything much, except to prove the principle 'Garbage in, garbage out'. ;-)

b

englishteacher79 · Sep 6, 2014

BobK said:
You're right to say that put is the most common collocation for pressure. As you've already looked in COCA I'll give you the results of my search in BNC (to show you that this is not a British anomaly. BNC reports 250 collocations, but only these 10 have 20 or more hits:

(and some of those are irrelevant - e.g. 'peer' can be a verb, which is why BNC lists it [although in this instance it is an adjective]).

Here's a link for my search. There is one hit for 'give pressure':

This looks to me like a flakey transcription, or a verbatim report of a slip of the tongue.

Don't be led to think that all those Google hits indicate anything much, except to prove the principle 'Garbage in, garbage out'. ;-)

b

Thanks for the responses. I just needed confirmation. I teach a lot of Asian (especially Chinese) students and I know that collocation seems to work in their language. And in the country where I live (Singapore), it's very common to use it like I mentioned. Google seems to have a lot of that "give" and "pressure" collocation and the sentences seem to come from fluent English speakers so it does make you seem to wonder! For example, "gives me a lot of pressure" has nearly 2 million results.

Cheers!

Raymott · Sep 6, 2014

I guess as an ex-medico, I'm more used to applying pressure than putting pressure on people.
I wonder if corpus technology has reached the point of being able to discriminate between when a collocation refers to a person and when it refers to a thing. I think you'd have to manually look at the list it returned and make a judgement. In any case, it does illustrate that the most common collocation is not always the right choice and could be completely wrong to use.

emsr2d2 · Sep 6, 2014

I would use "My father puts a lot of pressure on me".

Matthew Wai · Sep 6, 2014

englishteacher79 said:
"gives me a lot of pressure" has nearly 2 million results.

It is the word-for-word translation of the Chinese equivalent, speaking as a Chinese.

Not a teacher.

BobK · Sep 7, 2014

And 'gives me a lot of pleasure' works! ;-)

More seriously, if the collocation is widely accepted in Asian English I withdraw the 'garbage' slur. It seems to me that English as a Lingua Franca shouldn't feel the need to aim to restrict itself to collocations accepted in American or British English.

b

[Vocabulary] Give (V) + Pressure (N)?

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