| It has long been recognized by linguists that there are various kinds of formulaic language in language use. As far back as in the middle of the 19th century, John Hughlings Jackson noticed that some aphasics who could not produce novel utterances were nonetheless able to recite, in a fluent manner, rhymes, prayers and routine greetings. Then, early in the 20th century, Ferdinand de Saussure and Otto Jesperson also recognized the importance of formulaic language to non-impaired speakers. They both argued that the brain could ease the burden of language production by means of bundling together frequent strings of language into unanalyzed units. However, Chomskyan linguists held that the importance of formulas in language production and comprehension was only secondary, and that linguistic competence was essentially creative. Influenced by Noam Chomsky and his followers, over the last three or four decades, the linguistic circle had almost always viewed language as a highly systematic and rule-governed behavior, and this view took the center stage in linguistic theories over that period of time.However, corpus analyses show that language use is considerably formulaic, with various kinds of continuous word combinations or multi-word units in native speakers’oral and written discourse, and these come in different lengths, structures and functions. Douglas Biber and his colleagues refer to these multi-word units as‘lexical bundles’and they carried out a considerable amount of research on the uses and functions of lexical bundles in different modes or registers of text. Thus far, this corpus-driven approach has largely been used to explain divergences between different registers or text types, to identify meaningful or organizational units in discourse, or to compare native and nonnative speaker productions, but few scholars had done any systematic research on the psychological reality of lexical bundles. Existent research in this regard shows that not all corpus-derived constructions are psychologically real, and on top of that, these multi-word units are probably stored differently, according to the age, gender, social class, cultural background and personal experiences of the subject group involved. It therefore seems quite necessary that we reconsider the psychological reality of lexical bundles and compare their mental processing and representation among different subject groups. However, generally speaking, this kind of research was still few in number and monotonous in methodology; besides, some findings were often inconsistent. Moreover, in those papers that were published or open to public, most subjects of their studies were native English speakers or highly proficient L2 learners and in extremely few studies EFL learners were their subjects. Therefore, the present study was organized to investigate the learners’mental representation of lexical bundles in which the research subjects were Chinese EFL learners. The specific research questions are addressed as follows:(1) How are frequent lexical bundles mentally represented by Chinese EFL learners? That is, are they holistically or analytically (or a combination of both) represented?(2) Does the frequency of lexical bundles influence the mental representation of lexical bundles for Chinese EFL learners? If yes, to what extent?(3) Does the structural completeness of lexical bundles influence the mental representation of lexical bundles for Chinese learners? If yes, to what extent?Three different research methods were used in the study to investigate and explore the mental representation of the formulaic language (i.e. lexical bundles in the present study) for Chinese EFL learners. Specially, such methods included online grammaticality judgement (Experiments 1 & 2), self-paced word-by-word reading (Experiment 3), self-paced sentence-by-sentence reading (Experiment 4), and word monitoring (Experiment 5).After careful analysis and discussion of the experimental data, some major findings of the study are finally summarized as follows. (1) For intermediate learners, frequent lexical bundles are both holistically and analytically represented, while for advanced learners, these are holistically represented. Therefore, when processing this type of formulaic language, intermediate learners employ more analytic processing strategies while advanced learners make use of more holistic processing strategies.(2) The frequency of lexical bundles does have an effect on the mental representation of this type of formulaic language. As for those high frequency and high-mid frequency lexical bundles that occur with frequencies greater than 10 per million words, both intermediate and advanced learners represent them holistically, while for those low frequency lexical bundles that occur with frequencies lower than 5 per million words, intermediate learners represent them analytically and advanced learners represent them both analytically and holistically.(3) For intermediate learners, the structural completeness of lexical bundles does not have an obvious effect on the mental representation of this type of formulaic language, that is, both structurally complete and incomplete lexical bundles are both holistically and analytically represented, with the former enjoying a higher degree of lexicalization. For advanced learners, the structural completeness of lexical bundles does not have a noticeable influence on the mental representation of this type of formulaic language, either, that is, both structurally complete and incomplete lexical bundles are holistically represented.Based on the major findings of the present research, a series of models for the mental processing and representation of lexical bundles with different frequencies and structural completeness are tentatively proposed, which describe in an objective manner the mental representation and processing of lexical bundles on the part of Chinese EFL learners at intermediate and advanced proficiency levels. From these models, it is seen that intermediate learners prefer using analytic processing strategies, which in turn makes it hard for them to notice the existence of formulaic language in language use. Therefore, it is believed that English language teachers should attach great importance to teaching formulaic language, especially lexical bundles, by developing students’awareness of and sensitivity to formulaic language, and carrying out a wide range of classroom activities to improve and enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of teaching formulaic language, thereby improving students’English proficiency gradually. |
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