Structural Elaboration

Abstract

In Chapter 5, we described and assessed various routes of elaboration, taking as a starting point the semantic motivation of certain groups of chunks. Some of those routes were shown to lead learners towards a deeper appreciation of the meaning of figurative idioms in particular and were proposed as aids to learning, mostly for receptive purposes. In these cases, the elaboration is predominantly meaning-oriented. Other routes we presented, such as the ones suggested for clustering collocates that share the same semantic prosody (for example, the collocates of commit), are more form-oriented; they can help learners appreciate the lexical makeup of chunks and thus foster chunk learning for productive purposes too. In the present chapter, we will explore an additional pathway for such form-oriented, or ‘structural’, elaboration. We will show both that the lexical composition of a substantial number of chunks is phonologically motivated and that this kind of motivation can easily be exploited by teachers (and materials writers) in order to trigger mnemonically effective form-focused elaboration in the students. Further, we will argue that many word sequences have become standardized owing to the appeal and/or mnemonic effect of phonological repetition.