THE ROLE OF LEARNER CORPUS RESEARCH IN THE STUDY OF L2 PHRASEOLOGY: MAIN CONTRIBUTIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS

This study describes some of the main contributions of Learner Corpus Research to the study of L2 phraseology. Although recently established, this strand of research has already provided significant results in the analysis of phraseology in learner language. The corpus-based approach has strongly contributed to the establishment of the key role of the phraseological dimension in the acquisition of a second or foreign language. After a brief description of some of the main results achieved in the field of L2 phraseology research, the study describes the most common statistical association measures, each representing a specific phraseological dimension (repetition, diversification, type-token distribution, strength of association, exclusivity, and directionality). Through their systematic use, Learner Corpus Research is playing an important role in the identification of phraseological sequences, providing robust empirical methods to extract them from learner corpora, analyse their distribution, and measure their properties.