Prepositional constituents in multi-word units: an experimental reading study of the French preposition de

Abstract

Abstract The processing of multi-word units and complex words has been one of the main issues of psycholinguistic research in the last decades. However, there is still no mutual consent on how multi-word units, complex words, and their internal constituents are accessed in language processing. Current models of linguistic theory and language processing generally assume that there is no interconnection between the morphosyntactic information of a lexical unit and its phonetic realization. Recent studies challenge this assumption and suggest a relationship between the morphosyntactic, lexical, and pragmatic information of specific lexemes or morphemes and the phonetic signal. The present study adds to these current studies in psycholinguistics and morphophonetics by investigating the French preposition de ‘of’ as a constituent in different construction types. While de occurs regularly as a free lexeme in syntactic structures, it also appears as a bound constituent in lexicalized and grammaticalized constructions. First, this study presents an analysis of French de in eye-tracking data from a reading task with French native speakers. Second, this study presents a statistical analysis of acoustic durations of de from an experimental reading task. The results suggest that the constituent de shows certain peculiarities in its processing and acoustic realization as a constituent in a certain construction type. The results are discussed with regard to current theoretical approaches to the processing of multi-word units, n-grams, and complex words.