Applying phraseological complexity measures to L2 French

Abstract

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.

Comparing the longitudinal development of phraseological complexity across oral and written tasks

“…However, phraseological diversity, operationalized as the root type-token ratio (RTTR) of the units, was not significantly different across proficiency levels. Similar results were reported by Vandeweerd, Housen, and Paquot (2021) who conducted a partial replication study using L2 French argumentative essays (B2-C2). While the diversity of adjectival modifiers did increase significantly from C1 to C2, this measure was not found to be an important predictor of the scores given to a text by professional raters, when controlling for other aspects of complexity (i.e., lexical, syntactic, morphological).…”

“…Regarding French, which is the target language of the learners in our study, no one has yet compared the development of phraseology across modes, but phraseological complexity has been shown to be associated with proficiency separately in each modality (Forsberg, 2010;Vandeweerd et al, 2021) 4 and has been shown to increase over time during a study abroad (Edmonds & Gudmestad, 2021). While these studies suggest that phraseology develops with proficiency in French, no study has yet traced the development of phraseological complexity in terms of diversity and sophistication over time, nor compared the longitudinal development across oral and written tasks.…”

Proficiency at the lexis–grammar interface: Comparing oral versus written French exam tasks

“…The current study, therefore, aims to determine the extent to which measures of phraseological complexity are predictive of oral versus written French proficiency scores in the context of a high-stakes language assessment exam. In line with previous research, we expect that measures of phraseological complexity will be predictive of proficiency even when controlling for the lexical complexity of a text (Vandeweerd et al, 2021). This would suggest that raters are sensitive to complexity not just at the level of lexis but also at the lexis–grammar interface (i.e., that phraseological measures are not simply a subset of lexical complexity measures) as argued by Paquot, Gries, and Yoder (2021).…”

“…With regard to French, the target language of the learners in our study, phraseological complexity has also been found to increase with proficiency both in oral production (Forsberg, 2010), and in written production (Vandeweerd et al, 2021). Only one study thus far has directly compared phraseological complexity across modes, however.…”

Open Corpus Linguistics – or How to overcome common problems in dealing with corpus data by adopting open research practices

“…Apart from offering the possibility to compare different results, replication studies can also enable us to compare different operationalizations of the same variable(s) (see e.g. Omidian et al 2021;Vandeweerd et al 2021). Sönning & Werner (2021: 1182 mention the following list of problems that have been identified as potential causes of non-replicability:…”