Vandeweerd, N., Lundell, F. F., & Arvidsson, K. (2025). The Structures That Matter: Identifying Relevant Syntactic Units for the Study of L2 French Phraseology. Journal of the European Second Language Association, 9(1), 54–68. DOI: https://doi.org/10.22599/
Abstract
This study investigates the extent to which syntactic structures typically analyzed in phraseological complexity studies (e.g., verb + noun, adjective + noun and verb + adverb collocations) capture the range of multi-word phenomena exhibited in French learner texts. To this end, we re-examined data from a previous study in which multi-word sequences were identified in second-language (L2) French texts using a manual bottom-up procedure (Forsberg & Bartning, 2010). Each sequence from the original study was coded for syntactic structure in order to determine which types of phraseological units were present in the learner texts. The results showed that while verb + noun, adjective + noun and adverb + verb collocations made up a large proportion of manually identified sequences (36% of types), other syntactic structures were also frequently identified by the authors of the original study. These included, for example, verbs + prepositions (e.g., commence à [start to]; 16.4% of types), prepositional phrases (e.g., au fur et à mesure [progressively]; 15.2% of types) as well as nouns modified by prepositional phrases (qualtité de vie [quality of life]; 5.5% of types). We also compared the frequency of these syntactic structures across Common European Framework Reference proficiency levels. These results shed more light on the construct of phraseological complexity and provide insights into the types of units to focus on in future studies of phraseological complexity in L2 French.