The longitudinal development of phraseology in Chinese learners of Italian l2: a preliminary study on some categories of errors

Abstract

This study is a preliminary investigation of the development of phraseology in Chinese learners of Italian. Based on an error-annotated longitudinal learner corpus, it aims at analysing three different categories of lexical combinations, in order to understand to what extent phraseological errors are affected by time and by the use of either the open-choice or the idiom principle (Sinclair 1991). The analysis shows that L2 phraseology learning can be slow and uneven. As formulaicity is pervasive in language, research on phraseological errors can provide invaluable support for language teaching and learning.