Chapter 6 - Meaning-Shift Units in L2 Processing: Usage vs. Word Association Responses

Summary

Chapter 6 analyzes word association responses, categorizes them into meaning-based and syntagmatic and compares to the patterns of corresponding usage corpora. It shows that words eliciting meaning-based responses tend to be independent in usage while words eliciting syntagmatic responses tend to participate in multi-word units, suggesting that word associations can indeed say something about the processes at work in language use. A deeper analysis of syntagmatic associations and their comparison to usage patterns suggest the psycholinguistic reality of the model of a unit of meaning and in particular of abstracted associations: those of colligation and semantic preference. The chapter also discusses the core meaning effect, the influence of directionality and contiguity on the strength of association, the relationship of syntagmatic association to the boundaries of a unit of meaning as well as the evidence of the processes of fixing and approximation observed in Chapter 5.