McCarthy wrote:Chunks are chunks: analyzing them and taking them apart may not be useful, and they should be processed and retrieved holistically (see Wray, 2002).
I'm going to basically repeat what I said last time chunks came up: that is not what the concept of chunking in neuropsychology is about, and if linguists want to borrow terminology from psychology, they shouldn't change the concept; if they want to talk about a different concept, they should change the word.
Chunking is intrinsically multi-level. Recalling a chunk may manifest itself superficially with the instant recall of the entire phrase, but the hypothesis in (psychological) chunking is (as it was explained to me, at least) that all the schemata relating to the chunk are recalled simultaneously.
If I respond to "thank you" with "no bother, pal", I recall the full sentence as a chunk. But that chunk is itself composed of two chunks: "no bother" and "pal". One of those chunks is a word, and there's (arguably) nothing else to recall, but "no bother" is also a noun phrase consisting of a quantifier (no) and a noun (bother). My brain's activating and recalling all the "circuitry" for the two words, and the rule, and everything that revolves around "bother" by uncountable... all simultaneously.
Chunks built of chunks built of chunks -- that's the psychological model.
This notion that a lot in the teaching community that chunks are strictly indivisible doesn't come from any cognitive theory that I'm aware of, and I've never heard any solid intellectual argument for it. The closest I've heard to an argument is that it's quicker than spontaneous production of original utterances, but that's not a counterargument to the "nested" chunking of psychology, because chunking was always an explanation of higher-order concepts and skills and how these complex things are quick to recall.
reineke wrote:Iversen wrote:reineke wrote:Chunks are chunks: analyzing them and taking them apart may not be useful, and they should be processed and retrieved holistically (see Wray, 2002).
And that's one point where I beg to differ. I have just started to do wordlists with French expressions, and before that I read scores of pages with such expressions from a book containing page up and page down with such expressions, and it is obvious that they almost always are meaningful - the only problem is that you sometimes don't have the background information to see the logic.
Of course you also have to learn expressions and chunks as multi-word compounds, but I know from experience that I remember them better when I know what their components mean. Learning such compounds 'holistically' (without caring about the meaning of their components) would be the same as to burdening my memory with thousands of very long words. Learning them as meaningful word combinations makes the task much easier.
I don't disagree with your comment at all. Idioms, colloquial expressions and phrasal verbs count as lexical chunks and analyzing them and taking them apart may prove fun, useful and interesting. In some cases even rank beginners (hey, a chunk!)
Rank amateur, surely...?
will already understand the basic constituents of expressions such as "you know" but feel confused about the word combination or miss it completely. However chunks do need to be processed and retrieved holistically to make sense.
Yes, but psychology says they cannot be processed and retrieved holistically and naturally if the constituent concepts are not themselves already acquired.
If you start learning English and are taught to say "no bother pal" and don't know that "no bother" is itself a chunk, so you won't have the internal organisation that "no bother pal" is "no bother" + "pal", and you won't know that "no bother" = "quantifier:no" + "noun:uncount:bother" + "rule: quantifier before noun".
Thus you will not be processing the chunk in the same way a fluent speaker would, instead processing it as a memorised sequence. i.e. you're not processing it as a chunk.