Diversity and Sophistication of Collocations in Written Production of Learners and Native Speakers of Spanish
doi: https://doi.org/10.31810/rsel.55.2.6
Keywords:
Spanish as a second language; collocations; phraseological complexity; collocational diversity; collocational sophisticationAbstract
The development of formulaic language in second language (L2) has been analyzed in studies that point to the use of collocations as a reliable indicator of linguistic proficiency. However, collocations have received little attention in research on linguistic complexity. The present study aims to contribute to this line of research by analyzing phraseological complexity, a construct that refers to the diversity and sophistication of collocations used in written production of intermediate and advanced learners and native speakers of Spanish. Verb-noun and noun-adjective collocations are analyzed in narrative and expository texts. The data comes from two spontaneous writing production tasks based on a visual stimulus. The results show that phraseological complexity increases with proficiency, with equivalent patterns across text types, but the developmental pattern did vary according to the syntactic structure of collocations. The implications of these findings for L2 teaching are discussed and directions for future research are suggested.
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