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Second Language Lexis and the Idiom Principle

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Second Language Lexis and the Idiom Principle CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by Helsingin yliopiston digitaalinen arkisto Second language lexis and the idiom principle Svetlana Vetchinnikova Academic dissertation to be publicly discussed, by due permission of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Helsinki, in auditorium XIII, University main building, on the 29th of August 2014, at 12 o’clock. Department of Modern Languages University of Helsinki Cover illustration: Klaudia Rastorgueva © Svetlana Vetchinnikova 2014 ISBN 978-951-51-0063-4 (paperback) ISBN 978-951-51-0064-1 (PDF) http://ethesis.helsinki.fi Unigrafia Helsinki 2014 Abstract This work sets out to examine how second language (L2) users of English acquire, use and process lexical items. For this purpose three types of data were collected from five non-native students of the University of Helsinki. First, each student’s drafts of Master’s thesis chapters written over a period of time were compiled into a language usage corpus. Second, academic publications a student referred to in her thesis were compiled into a corpus representing her language exposure. Third, several hundreds of words a student used in her thesis were presented to her as stimuli in word association tasks to obtain psycholinguistic data on the representation of the patterns in the mind. Lexical usage patterns, conceived of in accordance with John Sinclair’s conceptualisation of lexis and meaning, were then compared to (1) language exposure and (2) word association responses. The results of this triangulation show that, contrary to mainstream thinking in SLA, language production on the idiom principle, i.e. by retrieving holistic patterns glued by syntagmatic association rather than constructing them word by word, is available to L2 users to a much larger degree than is often claimed. More than half of significant multi-word units used by the students also occur in the language they were exposed to. The ‘idiosyncratic’ multi-word units are often a result of approximation or fixing. Approximation is a process through which a more or less fixed pattern loosens and becomes variable on the semantic or grammatical axis due to frequency effects and the properties of human memory. Fixing, on the other hand, is a reverse process making the wording of the pattern become ‘overly’ fixed through repeated usage. Neither of the processes damage the meaning communicated in any way. Word association responses also support the main conclusion of the availability of the idiom principle showing that multi-word units used are also represented holistically in the mind and so confirming the continuity between exposure, usage and psycholinguistic representation. Furthermore, they suggest that the model of a unit of meaning developed by Sinclair has psycholinguistic reality as representations of lexical items in the mind seem to mirror the components of a unit of meaning: collocation, colligation and semantic preference. This work offers an in-depth discussion of Sinclair’s conceptualisation of meaning and a novel methodology for studying units of meaning in L2 use both quantitatively and qualitatively by triangulating usage, exposure and word association data. It is hoped that the dissertation will be of interest to scholars specialising in second language acquisition and use, English as a lingua franca, phraseological view of language and corpus linguistic methodology. Contents Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................... viii 1. Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 1 1.1. Research data and questions ....................................................................................... 3 1.2. Structure of the thesis ................................................................................................. 4 2. Unit of meaning and the idiom principle ........................................................................ 5 2.1. Phraseology: an anomaly or a characteristic property of language? ............................. 5 2.2. Unit of meaning: the model ........................................................................................ 6 2.3. Single-word units ..................................................................................................... 10 2.4. Collocation and meaning-shift: from Firth to Sinclair ............................................... 12 2.5. Co-selection or the idiom principle ........................................................................... 16 2.6. Semantic prosody as a communicative function of a unit of meaning ........................ 16 2.6.1. Semantic prosody. Where does it belong? .......................................................... 18 2.6.2. Semantic prosody, connotation and evaluation ................................................... 21 2.6.3. Semantic prosody: Synchronic vs. diachronic perspective .................................. 23 2.6.4. Semantic prosody and intuition .......................................................................... 24 2.7. The theory of meaning and the ultimate dictionary ................................................... 27 2.8. Lexical priming ........................................................................................................ 29 2.8.1. The importance of meaning for the psycholinguistic reality................................ 30 2.8.2. Dependent choices at different levels: psycholinguistic vs. other ........................ 31 2.9. Louw’s semantic prosody ......................................................................................... 35 2.10. Formulaicity and novelty vs. idiom and open-choice principles .............................. 36 2.11. Psycholinguistic reality of a unit of meaning: a summary........................................ 38 2.12. Conclusion ............................................................................................................. 41 3. Second language acquisition and use of multi-word units ........................................... 43 3.1. Phraseology seen as a major problem for language learners ...................................... 44 3.2. Learner language research: NS vs. NNS ................................................................... 45 3.3. Wray’s psycholinguistic explanation of the problem ................................................. 49 3.4. Revisiting the approach of learner language research ................................................ 52 3.5. An alternative explanation ........................................................................................ 57 3.6. Cognitive basis of the ‘approximation’- hypothesis ................................................... 59 iv 3.7. Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 62 4. Data collection and research methods .......................................................................... 64 4.1. Data collection: context and methods ........................................................................ 64 4.1.1. The context and arrangements of data collection ................................................ 65 4.1.2. Participants ........................................................................................................ 67 4.1.3. Longitudinal corpora of written production (C1) ................................................ 69 4.1.4. Reference corpora of the priming language (C2) ................................................ 70 4.1.5. Psycholinguistic data: word association responses ............................................. 72 4.2. Methods of analysis .................................................................................................. 92 4.2.1. Analysing units of meaning................................................................................ 92 4.2.2. Operationalising units of meaning ...................................................................... 93 4.2.3. An overview of the procedures........................................................................... 97 4.2.4. Combining qualitative and quantitative analyses ................................................ 99 4.2.5. Using the BNC ................................................................................................ 100 4.2.6. A note on notation ........................................................................................... 100 4.3. Conclusion ............................................................................................................. 101 5. Idiom principle in second language acquisition and use: C1 vs. C2 .......................... 104 5.1. Are the patterns of co-selection observable in the L2 texts? .................................... 105 5.2. Where do the patterns come from? .......................................................................... 108 5.2.1. The scope of C1 patterns under investigation ................................................... 109 5.2.2. Comparing C1 patterns to the priming language (C2): Do they match? ............ 110 5.2.3. How realistic is the automatic comparison? - A qualitative examination .......... 114 5.3. Matching patterns ................................................................................................... 115 5.3.1. Specialisation of patterning .............................................................................
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