Bridging the gap between syntactic complexity and lexical diversity research: Phraseology – the keystone?

Paquot, Magali
(2015) XXXIII Congreso International de la Asociación Española de Lingüística Aplicada (AESLA) — Location: Madrid, Spain (16.April.2015)

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A major contribution of recent research in theoretical linguistics, corpus linguistics and psycholinguistics has been to provide convergent evidence that lexis and grammar are closely intertwined (Sinclair, 1991; Stefanowitsch & Gries, 2003; Goldberg, 2006, Ellis & Cadierno, 2009; Römer, 2009). It has also been convincingly demonstrated that language is essentially made up of word combinations that constitute single choices and that words acquire meanings from their context (Sinclair, 1991; Biber et al., 1999; Wray, 2002). The construct of linguistic complexity, however, is still typically narrowed down to syntactic complexity in second/foreign language acquisition research (Ortega, 2003). When lexical diversity is investigated, it is also often restricted to lexical variation and sophistication and analyzed by means of single word-based measures such as type/token formulas and/or frequency word lists (Wolfe-Quintero et al., 1998: 101-115; Lu, 2012; Jarvis & Daller, 2013). The main objective of this presentation is to examine the potential role of phraseology in interlanguage complexity research by comparing measures of syntactic and lexical complexity with indices tapping phraseological and lexico-grammatical competence. The data used are extracted from the Varieties of English for Specific Purposes dAtabase (VESPA, https://www.uclouvain.be/en-cecl-vespa.html), a learner corpus made up of 123 research papers written by French EFL learners in the context of BA and MA linguistics courses (c. 370,000 words).
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Paquot, M. (2015). Bridging the gap between syntactic complexity and lexical diversity research: Phraseology – the keystone? XXXIII Congreso International de la Asociación Española de Lingüística Aplicada (AESLA), Madrid, Spain. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/195180