Construction cognitive d’un motif : cooccurrences textuelles et associations mémorielles

Abstract

Since Sinclair (1991), it is generally recognized that speakers make use of a collection of “ready built” expressions whose origin and storage are not only located within the individual memory of each speaker, but are part of a set of common resources shared by a distinct group of speakers. For more than ten years now, researches have shown that this set includes textual structures which cannot be considered as “phraseological” in a narrow sense. Hence it was suggested spreading the field of the phraseology (Legallois & Tutin 2013). Longrée & Mellet (2013) showed that both these textual structures and the phraseological units can be described as occurrences of a new kind of linguistic unit, the motif. This paper deals with the mechanism grounding the stabilization, the memorization and the recognition of the textual motifs. It will combine two different methods applied to a set of Latin motifs made of three lexical items: on the one hand, from the point of view of a psycho-cognitive approach, an experiment allowing to evaluate the multiple semantic priming effects, on the other hand, from a statistical point of view, a study of collocations in a reference corpus. Both methods, psychological and statistical, give noticeably convergent and promising results which enhance considerably the theoretical models trying to describe the processing of semantic association.

Keywords

• Textual ‘motifs’
• semantic association
• linguistic psychology
• acquisition
• lexical storage