The present study investigates whether lexical fixedness and compositionality play a role in L1 and L2 speakers’ intuitions about Italian word combinations. Data from an acceptability and a lexical choice task were analysed using psycholinguistic and computational indices. The present research presents new insights into L1 and L2 phraseology.
The present research investigates whether three types of Italian word combinations (free combinations, collocations and idioms) differ in terms of lexical fixedness and compositionality. Do first (L1) and second language (L2) speakers perceive these three types of combinations differently? Do lexical fixedness and compositionality play a role in learners’ vocabulary choices? To verify this, two studies were carried out. In Study 1, Italian verb+noun combinations were embedded into sentences in their original form or with the verb being replaced with a synonym. L1 and L2 speakers rated sentence acceptability. In Study 2, the verb was removed from each sentence and participants had to choose the verb they felt was most acceptable. Mixed-effects modelling showed that L1 speakers perceived the three types of word combinations differently in terms of lexical fixedness. Likewise, L2 speakers judged idioms as the most lexically restricted word combinations, but, unlike L1 speakers, their intuitions about collocations were not accurate. Additional analyses were conducted to assess if compositionality affects L1 and L2 speakers’ intuitions about the lexical restriction of word combinations and to what extent compositionality interacts with lexical fixedness in L1 and L2 speakers’ intuitions about vocabulary use. We employed the variant- and addition-based distributional measures of compositionality proposed by Senaldi, Lebani and Lenci (2016, 2017), who showed them to be reliable in defining lexical variability and compositionality of idiomatic phrases. We extended these measures to free combinations and collocations. L1 speakers’ judgments of lexical fixedness and distributional measures of compositionality were then added to the mixed effects models based on the data collected in Study 1 and 2. Taken together, our findings provide new insights into how L1 and L2 speakers of Italian perceive word combinations that vary along the continua of lexical fixedness and compositionality, suggesting interesting differences between the two participant groups.
