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Article published In:
International Journal of Learner Corpus Research
Vol. 7:2 (2021) ► pp.197–229

Applying phraseological complexity measures to L2 French

A partial replication study [*] *

| Université catholique de Louvain | Vrije Universiteit Brussel
| Vrije Universiteit Brussel
| Université catholique de Louvain

This study partially replicates Paquot’s (2018, 2019) study of phraseological complexity in L2 English by investigating how phraseological complexity compares across proficiency levels as well as how phraseological complexity measures relate to lexical, syntactic and morphological complexity measures in a corpus of L2 French argumentative essays. Phraseological complexity is operationalized as the diversity (root type-token ratio; RTTR) and sophistication (pointwise mutual information; PMI) of three types of grammatical dependencies: adjectival modifiers, adverbial modifiers and direct objects. Results reveal a significant increase in the mean PMI of direct objects and the RTTR of adjectival modifiers across proficiency levels. In addition to phraseological sophistication, important predictors of proficiency include measures of lexical diversity, lexical sophistication, syntactic (phrasal) complexity and morphological complexity. The results provide cross-linguistic validation for the results of Paquot (2018, 2019) and further highlight the importance of including phraseological measures in the current repertoire of L2 complexity measures.

Keywords: L2 French, replication, phraseology, collocations, complexity, CEFR
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Complexity research in L2 French
  • 3.Data and method
    • 3.1Learner data
    • 3.2Complexity measures
      • 3.2.1Phraseological complexity
      • 3.2.2Lexical complexity
      • 3.2.3Syntactic complexity
      • 3.2.4Morphological complexity
    • 3.3Analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Phraseological measures (RQ1)
    • 4.2Random forest model (RQ2)
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1How does phraseological complexity compare in written L2 French at different proficiency levels (RQ1)?
    • 5.2To what extent does phraseological complexity relate to lexical, syntactic and morphological complexity in L2 written French (RQ2)?
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Supplementary materials
  • References
Published online: 11 October 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijlcr.20015.van
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