Textual constraints in L2 lexical disambiguation

Abstract

Part of understanding a foreign language text involves the ability to solve lexical ambiguities that are not found in the first language. Traditionally, it has been claimed that the resolution of lexical ambiguity is done through schema activation. The hypothesis investigated here is that collocation may be a more dependable source than the reader's previous knowledge. Twenty ambiguous words were selected, disambiguated through rules based on collocation, and then tested with a concordancer, using an English language corpus of 20 000 000 words of expository text. The results showed that more than 94% of the ambiguities were solved by using syntactic and semantic restrictions between the ambiguous word and a related disambiguating word that co-occurred in the same sentence. The interpretation offered for these results is that collocation replaces with many advantages the use of encyclopedic knowledge to solve lexical ambiguities.