Un Mot, des Fonctions, des Contextes

We presented six words to subjects, who were asked to produce a sentence for each of these words. Results show that each word occupies one or two dominating syntactic positions. This can be explained by semantic stereotypy and by syntactic stereotypy. This last notion refers to idiomatisms, "couplons", preformed sequences and semantico-syntactic structures. The whole study leads to the conclusion that subjects do not memorize isolated words but rather that they memorize words together with the semantic and syntactic contexts in which they previously met them.