INTRODUCTION

For language learners, spoken interaction with target language speakers not only has the function of achieving communication, but also has an acquisitional role in providing opportunities for the learners to expand their interlanguage, chances which different learners will exploit to varying degrees. Formulation attempts furnish occasions for a learner to search, establish, practise and consolidate new expressions, either in spontaneous use in passing or in active cooperation with the interlocutor. Especially the latter case, where the learner appeals to the target language speaker, offers the researcher a possibility to study the acquisitional attempts in detail. Our focus here will be on lexical items. The purpose of the article is to describe and discuss the attempts by one particularly active learner to elicit and try out new vocabulary in conversations with a native speaker.

The study of lexical acquisition processes in language production of course has parallels on the comprehension side. Thus learners' vocabulary expansion by reading has been studied extensively (for a review of this research, see de Bot, Paribakht and Wesche 1997). Haastrup's (1985, 1987, 1990, 1991) detailed studies of the process of lexical inferencing provide a close-up view on how learners try to find out the meaning of encountered unfamiliar words, focusing especially on how the learners reason about the words and what knowledge they bring to bear on the task.

The (largely) complementary relationship between lexical inferencing and lexical search during formulation can be expressed in the terms of Levelt's (1989, 1993) speech production model. In this framework the entries in the mental lexicon are viewed as the association between a lemma part, containing the word’s semantic and syntactic information, and a form or lexeme part which gives the corresponding phonological shape, or set of shapes. Thus whereas (for a language learner) lexical inferencing is a matter of establishing a lemma for a given lexical form, lexical search starts with an intended (tentative) notion for which a lemma is expected to exist in the target language, and the task is to arrive at an appropriate lexeme.