The Theoretical Foundation of Lexcial Chunks

刘璐

【Abstract】 Researchers find that there are some elements which are extremely similar or completely identical in daily expressions for conversation in English. The explorations of lexical chunks are of great significance to acquire English efficiently and apply English in practice accurately and fluently.

【Key Words】 Lexical chunks； corpus linguistics

【中圖分类号】 G623.5 【文献标识码】 A 【文章编号】 2095-3089（2018）07-0-01

Lexical chunks consisting two or more words is combinations of meaning and form which are memorized and employed as a whole.

1. Psycholinguistic Foundation

As we all know， psychologists divide human memory into three categories that includes sensory storage， short-term memory and long-term memory. Miller G points that the capacity of the short-time memory is about 7+/-2 units， which stands for the limitation of our capability of information processing. The goal of knowledge learning is to put the content what we have learned into long-term memory for later extraction. Therefore， if you use the original way， like building blocks to recite an English sentence. People are able to recode fragmentary information into meaningful larger chunks and inter-linked with each other based on the chunking strategies no matter how limited the short-term memory is.

2. Corpus Linguistic Foundation

Linguists （eg.， Sinclair 1980） establish a COBUILD corpus including two million words. Sinclair finds that language users in daily communication are not based on “open choice principle”， but mainly based on “idiom principle”， that is to use a large number of ready-made chunks to assemble the sentences in order to achieve its meanings. Therefore， Sinclair advocates “idiom principle.”

Researches on corpus linguistics discover that language has dual properties： analyzability and formality. It is not only based on grammar rule which can be analyzed and relatively closed system， but also a memory-based and chunks-based， relatively open system. The former occupies small space but it is memory-intensive and the language users are difficult to make accurate communication with each other； the latter includes a large number of chunks and is easier for language users to communicate frequently because chunks can be extracted from memory as a whole.

References：

Miller， G.A. 1956. The magical number seven， plus or minus two： Some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review.

Sinclair， J. 1991. Corpus， concordance， collocation. Oxford： Oxford University Press.