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learner must go through in order to gain full mastery of a word. It
is self-evident that vocabulary acquisition is an incremental
process.
On hearing the sound [‘sonno] a learner will associate it with
the action everyone performs while sleeping (‘dream’), but he will
be able to spell it correctly only after noticing the written form of
the word, sogno. Then he will learn that he must use verb inflections
to convey the fact that they sognano, or he ha sognato (‘has dreamt’)
yesterday. If he is thinking of sunbathing on a sandy beach while
sitting in his office, we can say that sogna ad occhi aperti (‘he is day-
dreaming’). Moreover, he could be asked if he ha fatto un brutto sogno
(‘has had a bad dream’) – realizing that we do not say *cattivo (‘bad’)
sogno, thus using the appropriate collocate. He might also use a
derivative when he claims he is not a sognatore (‘dreamer’).
Of course this is not a linear process and depends on the kind of
exposure the student has to a word, as well as on his proficiency in lan-
guage learning. Very often, we have only a partial knowledge of a
word.
Literature on vocabulary has shown that the term word is not
suitable when defining a single unit of meaning, because any lan-
guage, Italian in particular, uses many expressions made up of two
or more words to convey one single meaning. Therefore, the term
lexical unit or lexeme may be more appropriate.
A proposito (‘by the way’), d’altra parte (‘on the other hand’), come
va? (‘how are you?’), se fossi in te (‘if I were you’), fuoco amico (‘friend-
ly fire’), gratta e vinci (‘scratch and win lottery ticket’): these are just
examples of multiword units (MUWs) or lexical chunks,4 called
unità polirematiche in Italian. Though they are composed of more
than one word, they produce one single unit of meaning and are
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4 “Research using large corpora has shown that these multi-word lexical units (MWU) are ubiqui-
tous in language use, at least in English. This is especially true of spoken discourse. Moreover,
this same corpus research is now beginning to indicate that there is lexical patterning that
exists beyond even the MWU level. Some longer strings of language recur frequently and are
often connected with the functional usage of language. These longer strings have been called
various names, including lexical phrases (Nattinger and DeCarrico, 1992), lexical chunks (Lewis,
1993), lexicalized sentence stems (Pawley and Syder, 1983), and ready made (complex) units (Cowie,
1992).” Norbert Schmitt and Ronald Carter, “Lexical Phrases in Language Learning”, The
Language Teacher Online 24(8)/2000, http://www.jalt-publications.org/tlt/articles/2000/08/
schmitt (accessed June 19, 2009).
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