Word Formation: Economic or Economical?
A teacher is marking the 'Lexis and grammar in context' section of a mock PAU paper. The word-formation task contains five gaps based on a short text about remote work. The base words and the candidate's answers are: (1) SIGNIFY → significant (correct); (2) ECONOMY → economical (intended: economic); (3) FLEXIBLE → flexibility (correct); (4) ISOLATE → isolation (correct); (5) CLEAR → clear (intended: clarify). The sentence for gap 2 reads: 'The ______ benefits of remote work are debated, especially for small firms.' The sentence for gap 5 reads: 'Managers should ______ expectations before staff start working from home.' The candidate has 3/5 correct and asks why 'economical' is wrong when 'economic' and 'economical' both exist. The teacher has ten minutes in the next class to address the pattern rather than just give the answers.
1. Explain the candidate's two errors and decide whether they reflect a lexical gap, a grammatical gap, or both.
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The two errors are different in kind.
- ECONOMY → economical: this is primarily a lexical-semantic gap, not a morphological one. The candidate has formed a real adjective, but the wrong one. Economic means 'relating to the economy'; economical means 'saving money or resources'. In 'the ______ benefits of remote work are debated, especially for small firms', the intended meaning is benefits to the economy or to business finances in a broad sense. Economic benefits is the standard collocation. Economical benefits would suggest cost savings, which is possible in some contexts but is not the expected reading here and is not the usual collocation with 'benefits ... debated'. The suffix is right; the meaning is wrong.
- CLEAR → clear: this is both a word-class gap and a derivational gap. The gap requires a verb meaning 'make clear'. The candidate has left the adjective unchanged, so the sentence has no finite verb after 'should'. The correct form is clarify. If the candidate wanted to use clear, the structure would need 'make expectations clear', which the gap does not allow.
So the first error is semantic; the second is grammatical and derivational. Feedback should separate these two problems rather than treat both as 'wrong word formation'.
2. Design a 5-minute micro-task that targets the confusion, with three sentences and an answer key.
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Micro-task: same root, different meaning
Complete each sentence with economic or economical.
- The country's ______ growth slowed sharply after the crisis.
- A small car is more ______ to run than a large one.
- The government published a report on the ______ impact of tourism.
Then complete the instruction with the correct form of CLEAR. 4. Please ______ the instructions before the new staff arrive.
Answer key and brief rationale
- economic - relating to the economy as a system.
- economical - saving money; the focus is on cost efficiency.
- economic - relating to the economy; 'economic impact' is a fixed collocation.
- clarify - a verb is needed after 'please'; clear is an adjective.
The task takes five minutes if the teacher elicits the rule after item 2: -ic often means 'relating to a field'; -ical often means 'having a practical quality', but this is a tendency, not a law. The aim is to make the candidate check meaning and word class, not just add a suffix.
3. If the candidate wrote 'economical benefits', would you accept it? Give a reasoned decision with reference to the marking scheme's likely tolerance.
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I would not accept it as the primary answer, but I would flag the item as potentially ambiguous.
- In context, 'the ______ benefits of remote work are debated, especially for small firms' most naturally means benefits to the economy or to business performance in general. The expected form is economic. The base word ECONOMY and the academic register point strongly to this reading.
- 'Economical benefits' is grammatically well formed and semantically possible: it could mean 'benefits in terms of savings'. However, it shifts the meaning to cost efficiency and is a less natural collocation with 'benefits ... debated'. Most PAU word-formation keys allow one contextually correct answer, not every formally possible derivative.
- A defensible marking decision is: 0 points, with a note that the item rewards meaning in context, not just suffix knowledge. If the marking scheme explicitly allows any semantically acceptable derivative, the answer could be reviewed, but the candidate should still be shown why economic is the intended reading.
The teaching point is that word formation is not a suffix drill; the derived word must fit the collocation and meaning of the sentence.