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Chapter One Introduction

1.1 Background to the study
Corpus studies havedemonstrated the ubiquity of lexical chunks or lexical chunks in both spontaneousspeech and writing (Erman and Warren 2000; Altenberg 1998, cited in Wray 2000).And the significance of lexical chunks lies not only in its ubiquity in day-to-daylanguage, but also in the range of advantages it can offer. According to Wray (2002: 74),lexical chunks can serve two basic functions: sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic. Theformer means that lexical chunks can satisfy human beings’ "desire to sound like othersin the speech community", while the latter function refers to the processing advantagesit provides. Likewise, Millar (2011) proposes that lexical chunks can lead to two gainsfor both the learner and the interlocutor, which in turn can result in more efficientcommunication. The two gains are: a. Gains in fluency for learner production andcomprehension; b. Gains in comprehensibility for the addressee. Thus we can seelexical chunks play a very important role in language use and language learning.A lot of researchers have tried to investigate the psychological reality of lexicalchunks (e.g., Underwood, Schmidt and Galpin 2004; Schimtt and Underwood 2004;Jiang and Nekrasova 2007). The general findings suggest that lexical chunks areholistically stored in mental lexicon. They are represented and processed as singlelexicalized units. In other words, syntactic analysis is not needed in processing them.
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1.2 Significance of the study
The ultimate goal of interpreting research is to contribute to better interpretingquality. It has now been widely acknowledged that good interpreting involves skilleduse of chunks. And a lot of previous studies, both at home and abroad, have providedevidence in support of this argument. Yet there are still some aspects to be furthertested.The significance of the study lies in the following aspects: Although recent years have seen a burgeoning number of corpus-based studies ofterpreting, the total number of research adopting this data-elicitation paradigm inthe field of interpreting research is still far less than other comparable fields,such as translation, linguistics and second languge acquisition. Further, studieson the relationship between chunks and interpreting has barely made use ofcopora as the source of data. Therefore this study can provide more data andevidence to this line of research. It is widely held that good interpreters have a better command of chunks andthat good interpreting contains a larger number of lexical chunks compared withinterpretating of less good quality. In other words, the use of lexical chunks ispositively related to the overall quality of interpreting. Although this has beenimplicated by a few experimental studies, so far there has not been any study thattests this hypothesis based on corpora data. Futher, compared with the fewexperimental studies in which the data came from only fewer than 50participants, corpus-based study has the advantage of gathering much more data,which can better shed light on this topic.
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Chapter Two Literature Review

2.1 Lexical chunks
There has yet to be a consensus on the definition of lexical chunks. But generallyspeaking, there are two major approaches to defining lexical chunks. One istheory-based, which means that the researcher 本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。