Formulaic Language

Abstract

“Formulaic language” is a term that has come into use, particularly in the United Kingdom, in the last two decades. Its subject domain, multiword linguistic units, has been under investigation for at least the last century, with early work on multiword units by Jan Baudouin de Courtenay in Russia and Charles Bally in Switzerland. These beginnings have given rise to strong Continental research traditions in a branch of philology/linguistics termed “phraseology” (see the separate Oxford Bibliographies article in Linguistics “Idiom and Phraseology.” The term “formulaic language” encompasses two empirical domains. The first is a component of linguistic knowledge. Views differ on the extent of this domain. For some scholars it includes all multiword sequences that are held in long-term memory, including song lyrics, advertising jingles, play scripts, proverbs, and compound words. A more conservative view limits the set of formulaic sequences to vocabulary items that have grammatical structure—in other words, phrasal lexical items. The linguistic units of formulaic language are often termed “formulaic sequences,” but many other terms are used both inside the formulaic language research tradition and outside it. The second empirical domain is the use of multiword expressions in speech and writing—that is, an aspect of language use. Investigation in the first domain leads, among other things, to lexicographic and vocabulary acquisition research. Investigation in the second domain leads, for example, to studies of the use of technical phrases in air traffic control speech. Major research questions in these two domains are the identification of formulaic sequences, their place in theories of language, their acquisition in first and second language learning, their function in speech production and perception, and their function in creating native-like speech and writing.