A phraseological and phonological analysis of don’t: A stay abroad perspective

Abstract

We explore lexical development during a stay abroad for five francophone learners of English by focusing on how they use a single string, namely don’t. We adopt a phraseological perspective to explore change over time, opposing uses of don’t when it appears in the discourse marker I don’t know to other uses of this string. In addition to exploring the overall distribution of don’t, we also conduct an acoustic analysis to explore the phonetic realization of don’t as a function of whether it appears in a phraseological or non-phraseological sequence. Results point to slight changes over time in the use of I don’t know as a discourse marker and in the phonetic realization of this string. Our results highlight clear instances of inter-individual differences.

Keywords

• phraseology
• discourse markers
• phonetic reduction
• stay abroad