Lexical Phrases Found in Spoken Discourse - A Contrastive Study of Native and Non-Native Speakers of English

Lexical phrases (LPs), with a variety of labels, have attracted a great deal of researchers' attention in recent years in both linguistics and applied linguistics. They play an important role during the process of language acquisition. Based on Nattinger & DeCarricopsilas classification of LPs from functional perspective, the paper did a study which aims at comparing the use of LPs among a native and two non-native speakers of English in spoken discourse in order to gain the insight into the relationship between language proficiency, fluency, idiomaticity and the use of LPs.