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Lexical chunks are an important component of almost all types of discourse. We canfind lexical chunks' high frequency by quoting K. Conklin & N. Schmitt's words:Researches suggest that at least one-third to about a half of language is made up of lexicalchunks (Howarth, 1998a; Erman and Warren, 2000; Foster, 2001). Erman and Warren (2000) came toa conclusion that formulaic sequences of various classes constituted 58.6 percent of the spokenEnglish discourse after analyzing and 52.3 percent of the written discourse. Foster (2001) had raterslook for lexical chunks in transcripts of unplanned native speech，and these raters judged that 32.3percent of speech was made up of formulaic sequences. Howarth (1998a) did research to 238,000words of academic writing and came to find that 31-40 percent of it was made up of idioms andcollocations. Altenberg (1990) found that there are possibly as much as 70 percent of adult nativelanguage may be formulaic. Bibber et al. (1999) found that 3- and 4-word lexical bundles made up 28percent of the conversations and 20 percent of the academic prose they studied. As the studies whichare mentioned above were carried out with different criteria and from different perspectives, it is notsurprising that their results varied to some degree. However, based on all these numbers, we come tothe conclusion that lexical chunks make up a large part of any discourse. This has led Sinclair (1991)to argue that the structure of language is dominated by the idiom principle rather than the open-choiceprinciple (K. Conklin & N. Schmitt, 2007:3).From the quotation above，we can find the high frequency of lexical chunks inlanguage and it is necessary to give a detailed description of them. Therefore，in thischapter, a detailed review on lexical chunks, including its definitions, categories and itsmain functions in language development and acquisition are given, followed by Lewis'classification of chunks and a through review on the Lexical Approach. What come nextare studies on lexical chunks abroad and at home.

2.1 Lexical Chunks

2.1.1 Definitions of Lexical Chunks
The term "chunk" is first put forward by an American psychologist George A.Miller when he proposes the general theory of human cognition…Information ProcessingTheory— in 1956. “Chunking，，is one of his two theoretical ideas that are fundamental tocognitive psychology and the information processing framework. He presents the ideathat a chunk refers to any meaningful unit, such as digits，words, chess positions，or people's faces. He puts forward that it is obviously easy to select，store and deal withinformation with its help. Since then, the concept of chunking has become a basicelement of all subsequent theories of memory and the phenomenon of chunking has beenverified at all levels of cognitive processing. When the researcher studies the previousresearch, she finds it is apparently that different linguists use different terms on the sametopic. Such as “ready-made” frameworks (Becker, 1975)，formulaic utterances (WongFillmore, 1976)，speech formulas (Fetters, 1977)，lexicalized sentence stems (Pawley &Syder，1983)，formulaic speech (Ellis，1985)，prefabricated chunks (Widdowson，1989)，lexical bundles (Bibber D. & Finnegan E.，1989)，lexical items (Sinclair, 1998)，andlexical patterns (Hunston & Francis，1999)，multi-word items (Moon，2002)，formulaicsequence (Aliso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。