Given the importance of chunks in language processing, the present paper investigates the 'chunking behaviour' of verbal periphrases in Romance. To this end, offline data from corpus research will be related to online data from reading behaviour, exploring the relationship between patterns of chunking in production and comprehension.
Recent research has widely acknowledged the frequency and importance of multi-word sequences in various languages. Ranging from conventionalised everyday formulae and proverbs to collocations as well as diverse structurally bound multi-word units, the area pivots around lexicalised and grammaticalised elements alike. With a variety of theoretical approaches at hand, the necessity has arisen to examine these chunks from a psycholinguistic perspective in terms of acquisition and processing as well. While studies on proverbs and collocations, i.e. on the more 'lexical' strand, are already available to some extent (see e.g. Siyanova-Chanturia/Van Lancker Sidtis 2019 for a review), research about structures with more or less 'grammatical' multi-word items seems rather scarce so far. All the more does it prove crucial, thus, to investigate the processes underlying comprehension and production of formulaic sequences in the morphosyntactic domain. Periphrastic structures for the expression of temporal, aspectual, modal and diathetic values with partly or fully auxiliarised verb forms are regarded as a characteristic of all Romance languages, albeit their inventory and frequency differ in part among the individual languages. However, little is known so far about how these periphrastic multi-word sequences chunk in production and how they are processed in comprehension. The present paper sets out to bring together the results from an offline, frequency-based analysis of language-specific corpora on the one hand and data from an online, experimental psycholinguistic study on reading behaviour on the other hand. It will be explored how the results from both investigations relate and whether differences in the patterns of chunking can be stated with respect to the individual Romance languages under examination. References: Siyanova-Chanturia, Anna/Van Lancker Sidtis, Diana (2019): "What on-line processing tells us about formulaic language", in: Siyanova-Chanturia, Anna/Pellicer-Sánchez, Ana (eds.): Understanding Formulaic Language: A Second Language Acquisition Perspective. London/New York: Routledge, 38-61.
