Hello, I'm Ja ne Willis. If you know of any recent or on-going research in these areas, I'd be grateful if you would let me know. I will go into a little more detail on the first area, which is my most active research area and for which I have most data. Put simply, a lexical phrase is a string of words that are stored together in the mind as a single item and that you can retrieve and use as a pre-fabricated chunk, either exactly as it stands or with minimal adaptation.
Lexical phrases fill the gap between grammar, on the one hand, and vocabulary on the other.
As Pawley and Syder pointed out in their seminal paper in 1983, they play a vital part in both speech and writing, contributing to the ease, fluency and appropriacy with which someone speaks or writes. In other words, when conversing spontaneously in real time, we often fall back on the use of ready assembled chunks of language. This is partly because an appropriate chunk already exists and partly because we don't have time, while processing what is being said to us and thinking of what we want to express next, to compose every utterance from scratch, word by word, and to consciously fit each word into an appropriate grammatical paradigm. Lexical phrases also exist in written text, and different genres have their own specific sets of typical phrases. Here is a task for you to do.