1 a unit of text that is longer than a sentence and shorter than a paragraph
2 a unit of language longer than a word but shorter than a sentence and
which plays a role in comprehension and production.
see formulaic language
also known as lexical phrase, routine, gambitchunk analysisn
see chunking
chunk buildingn
see chunking
chunkingn
a term used in several different ways:
1 referring to the process of combining smaller, frequently co-occurring
units (e.g. morphemes, words, etc.) into larger ones (see chunk) that can be
stored or processed together as a unit. For example, utterances such as:
in the final analysis
I told you so
Y’know what your problem is?
can each be produced word by word according to productive rules of
grammar, but if a speaker (or writer) uses some of them repeatedly, they
are likely to be stored in memory as chunks. This process can also be called
chunk buildingor fusion.
see also adaptive control of thought
2 referring to the processes of dividing larger units into smaller parts. For
example, a long text can be broken into chunks that a learner works on
separately. This process can also be called chunk analysis.
3 referring to the process of organizing linguistic materials into hierarchical
chunksas an aid to memory. For example, a telephone number such
as 8089569238 would be difficult to remember as an undifferentiated
string. However, if it is broken into chunks such as 808 (area code) + 956
(exchange) +9238 (number), it is much easier to remember. Telephone
companies around the world differ in the ways in which they chunk these
numbers, but each of them has a system that does this in some fashion.
CI n
an abbreviation for confidence interval
citation form n
the form a word has when it is cited or pronounced in isolation, which may
be different from the form it has when it occurs in context. For example, the
citation form