Chapter 1 the study of collocations

2.4.5 Summary 
 
 
The reviewed literature so far suggests that: 
i)  L2 vocabulary development only recently received systematic attention and 
examination even though there have been studies suggesting the existence of 
developmental patterns in the acquisition of L2 vocabulary. 
ii)  Given the emerging consensus that vocabulary knowledge is best viewed as 
a network of associations, the acquisition of collocations is a valuable avenue to 
explore since it represents structural and semantic relationships between lexical 
items. 
iii)  Other language aspects have been found to exhibit developmental 
processes and patterns.  The acquisition of vocabulary, and in particular the 
acquisition of collocations could be found to follow a developmental process of 
some kind that can be described and analysed (Ellis 1994:113).