Towards a cross-linguistic concept of formulaic language: Introduction to a project

Buerki, Andreas ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2151-3246 2013. Towards a cross-linguistic concept of formulaic language: Introduction to a project. Presented at: Formulaic Language Research Seminar, Cardiff, 5 December 2013.

Full text not available from this repository.

Abstract

The phenomenon of formulaic language has in recent years attracted a great deal of research in such fields as corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, Natural Language Processing, psycholinguistics and beyond. Formulaic language is here understood as word sequences that recur again and again in largely the same form in language use. They include such items as conversational formulae (‘Thank you very much – not at all’), collocations (‘face a challenge’, ‘utter disgrace’), multi-word units (‘open letter’, ‘contempt of court’) as well as other usual sequences (‘half an hour’, ‘no chance of X’, ‘behind closed doors’). Formulaic language (FL) is held to be centrally important to language in a number of ways. For example, knowledge of items of FL is thought necessary for a high level of proficiency in a language, register, dialect or sociolect. This is because items of FL represent usual turns of phrase, notably a smaller set of expressions than what might be judged grammatical (e.g. Pawley & Syder 1983:191, O’Keeffe et al. 2007:60). FL is also thought to ease processing load during language production and thus enable fluency (Nattinger & DeCarrico 1992:32; Pawley & Syder 1983; Wray & Perkins 2000) as well as aiding mutual understanding in communication by activating usual situational and cultural background (Feilke, 2003:213; Wray, 2008: 20-1).

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	English, Communication and Philosophy
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics
Funders:	Swiss National Science Foundation, under Grant P2BSP1_148623
Last Modified:	28 Oct 2022 10:21
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/77955

Actions (repository staff only)

Edit Item