Kraut wrote:I think it is a useful concept: a chunk is a recurrent word combination that in the mind of a native speaker has been merged into one mental concept, the foreign learner of word lists and grammar chapters needs some time to merge the three words into one signifié.
An analogy: several phonemes make up a word, several words make up a chunk, word and chunk have only one mental concept each.
Does the brain really work like this, I don't know.
My point is that the "merged" concept is not an independent concept.
Consider, for example, "poner" and the verbs derived from it by adding a prefix.
"poner" is an irregular verb, and most if not all of the derived forms (suponer, imponer etc) conjugate the same way as poner. Spanish natives and competent non-native speakers don't recall the different verbs as distinct, unrelated items, but at the same time they don't derive the verb from first principles ever time they use it.
It will be different for learners, and there are two approaches to this sort of vocabulary.
You may learn it as a composition of prefix+conjugation of poner, or as an individual vocabulary item. The problem with learning it as an individual vocabulary item rather than a modification of poner is that all of a sudden you're memorising up to about 30 "irregular" verbs instead of one rule.
This is the point of chunking:
That the brain can "bundle together" a collection of known concepts into a single superordinate concept, so that all of those concepts can be recalled simultaneously.
When you recall a word like "imponer" you are automatically recalling im- and poner (and all the grammatical rules that go with it), and you are recalling the half-merged impo... simultaneously.
You chunk by combining known subordinate constituent concepts into a single collective "chunk" that can be recalled as a unit, and recalling the unit activates the subordinate concept.
Recalling a morpheme chunk automatically triggers recall of the phonemes it is made of.
Recalling a word automatically triggers recall of the morphemes it is made of, which automatically triggers recall of all the phonemes the morphemes are made of.
Recalling a fixed phrase automatically triggers recall of the words it is made of, which automatically triggers recall of the morphemes the words are made of, in turn automatically triggering recall of the phonemes the morphemes are made of.
Then we get to so-called "semi-fixed phrases", which are chunks that have free variables and can be modified. For example, "at the end of the day" is a fixed phrase -- no words in the phrase can be modified without breaking it; "[a] figment of his imagination", the example used in the book you quoted, is a "semi-fixed phrase" in that we have a single "free variable" to modify: whose imagination we're talking about.
Recall of a semi-fixed phrase absolutely requires selective recall of grammatical rules as well as a string of fixed sounds, and it's the standard grammatical rule that it inherits from its constituents, not a new grammatical rule unique to the chunk.
A "chunk" is a combination of things you already know. If you don't already know the things, it's not a "chunk", it's just a really long morpheme.