Use Of Formulaic Language Research Articles

Interpreter-mediated political communication N-Grammed: a corpus-driven discourse analysis of government interpreters’ (ideological) use of formulaic language

ABSTRACT Formulaic expressions/prefabricated chunks are established as crucial in fluent speech production in psycholinguistics and language acquisition/learning yet have been largely underexplored in interpreting studies, barring a few experimental studies. Formulaic expressions are particularly underexplored from a discursive perspective in interpreting, that is, how interpreters might employ formulaic expressions for discursive mediation. Drawing on 20 years of China’s political press conferences data, this study conducts a corpus-driven critical discourse analysis to explore the ideological/discursive properties of the linguistic category using the N-Gram function. The findings reveal that the interpreters’ formulaic language use manifests at multiple levels: Instead of being seemingly routine and innocuous, formulaic expressions used in interpreting can be ideologically salient in (re)constructing versions of truth, fact, and reality, discursively further strengthening China’s stance in the global lingua franca English. Contextualised bilingual examples are provided to demonstrate interpreters’ mediation. This interdisciplinary study contributes to current understanding of government interpreters’ agency in a changing sociocultural and geopolitical context.

To make a long story short: A descriptive study of formulaic language use in post-stroke fluent aphasia

ABSTRACT Background Language sample analysis is a common tool for inventorying an individual’s linguistic strengths and weaknesses. Although most research has focused on quantifying propositional or novel language production, studies suggest that individuals with aphasia, specifically nonfluent aphasia, produce high percentages of formulaic language relative to healthy controls. To date, little is known about how individuals with fluent aphasia subtypes use formulaic language and how the elicitation task influences their production. Aims The purpose of this research was to comprehensively describe patterns of formulaic language use in various discourse tasks in language samples of individuals with fluent aphasia. Methods & Procedures The retrospective analysis included discourse samples from Aphasiabank from 142 individuals with anomic, conduction, and Wernicke’s aphasia across four monologic discourse tasks. After identifying and classifying formulaic items into nine types, percentages of formulaic language were calculated for each participant and discourse task. Non-parametric statistics and Pearson’s correlations were used to compare production patterns and explore relationships between language severity and formulaic item types. Outcomes & Results Unique patterns of formulaic language were observed across groups including lower proportions of fillers in individuals with Wernicke’s aphasia and higher proportions of yes/no variants and speech formulas in individuals with conduction aphasia. Production patterns were most influenced by discourse task in individuals with anomic aphasia. Formulaic language use did not correlate with aphasia severity as measured by aphasia quotient. Conclusions Findings add to the evidence base describing formulaic language usage in individuals with post-stroke aphasia, which serves as a necessary foundation for eventual clinical application.

Chunking in simultaneous interpreting: the impact of task complexity and translation directionality on lexical bundles.

This study explored the use of phraseological frames (p-frames), a type of lexical bundle, by simultaneous interpreters as a strategy for managing cognitive loads. Specifically, using a comparable corpus of United Nations Security Council conferences, the study employed kfNgram to automatically identify the p-frames, and investigated their variations, regarding frequency, fixedness, structures, and functions among L1, L1-L2, and L2-L1 texts, which differ in cognitive loads due to task complexity and directionality of interpreting. The findings indicated that interpreters used more p-frames as cognitive loads increased; No significant difference was identified in fixedness as all texts tended to employ heavily formulaic and relatively fixed p-frames. Directionality correlated with grammatical preferences, with retour interpreting relying more on content-word-based p-frames. Additionally, task complexity correlated with functional preferences, with self-expression characterized by more stance expressions in the simple task. This study innovatively addressed the interaction of two factors that generate cognitive loads in interpreting and filled a research gap by providing empirical evidence on how directionality affects the use of formulaic language.

共时历时视域下史诗文本中的程式语研究

Every language and culture has a large amount of accumulation, which has been preserved in a unique way as different genres and language models have been passed down and developed. Formulaic language is a typical example of the inheritance and accumulation of ethnic culture in terms of language, especially in epic poems with typical ethnic cultural traditions, the use of formulaic language in narrative structures is particularly prominent. Taking the heroic epic ‘Jangar’ as an example, analyze the formulaic language and explore the transformation and evolution of highly stylized formal structures in the inheritance process of the epic “Jangar”, analyze the role and significance of programming language in existing epic texts.

Formulaic Language Use by Learners of English in Interlanguage Communication

This study investigated the use of formulaic language, in the form of four-word lexical bundles, by Thai learners of English as a second language (ESL) at various levels of English proficiency during interlanguage communication. The investigation focused on two aspects: the frequencies and pragmatic functions of the four-word lexical bundles. A total of 120 Thai ESL learners participated in the study, ranging from basic to intermediate and advanced English proficiency levels. In terms of frequency, a list of the most frequently used four-word lexical bundles by Thai ESL learners at each level was examined. Results showed that learners at higher English levels used less formulaic language in interactions than those at lower levels. Two similar four-word lexical bundles, centered on "I don't know" and "I think," were used by Thai ESL learners at all three English levels. The functional analysis demonstrated that Thai ESL learners at all three English levels used formulaic language to assert group identity as a device for social interaction and as a device for memory limitations to buy more time and process shortcuts. The function of asserting a separate identity was not used by intermediate-level Thai ESL learners. Furthermore, the function of processing shortcuts was used less at the advanced level than at the basic level. The findings of this study indicate that Thai ESL learners use formulaic language differently at different English proficiency levels. Therefore, formulaic language used by ESL learners in spoken English discourse should be further investigated.

Beyond words in evaluation: Formulaic language in critical reviews of research articles across disciplines

Formulaic language, characterized by phraseological patterns such as lexical bundles, has been observed to significantly influence the discourse of speakers and writers. These patterns tend to differ across genres and disciplines. However, the examination of formulaic language in evaluative genres, particularly across different disciplines, has been relatively limited. This study aims to explore the use of formulaic language in review feedback on manuscripts submitted by Iranian junior researchers to international journals across three disciplines. Using a discourse analytical approach, the study analyzes the frequency, structure, and function of the most prevalent four-word lexical bundles in 120 authentic peer reviews (recommending either major or minor revisions) in applied linguistics (AL), engineering, and business (40 from each discipline). The study explores how reviewers employ formulas to convey their comments to writers. The results reveal disciplinary differences in the usage, structure, and function of lexical bundles among reviewers. However, commonalities exist due to the inherent conventions of the evaluative genre. These disciplinary tendencies are also reflected in the organization of reviewers' reports and their commenting styles. The study contributes to enhancing the understanding of evaluative practices within specific disciplines by offering valuable insights into the phraseological patterns used in peer reviews and highlighting the discipline-specific formulaic expressions employed by reviewers to provide constructive feedback to authors.

İngilizce Öğretmen Adaylarının Kalıplaşmış Dil Kullanımına İlişkin Farkındalıkları: Dil Öğretimi İçin Çıkarımlar

The present paper aimed to explore pre-service English teachers’ awareness of formulaic language use. The study involved 41 senior students who were enrolled in the English Language Teaching Department at a state university in Turkey. Data of this cross-sectional study was collected through a formulaic language awareness form, which included three main parts. Firstly, participants were asked to write down three words that come to their mind concerning formulaic expressions, and their own definition of formulaic expressions. Secondly, they were required to place given formulaic expressions into the correct group on Kecskes’s Continuum Table. Finally, they were asked to identify formulaic expressions from a given text. Content and descriptive analysis were used to analyse the data and reveal the awareness of formulaic expressions among pre-service English teachers. The results indicated that the participants were somewhat familiar with the concept of formulaic expressions. They were able to identify grammatical units, phrasal verbs, and idioms, but struggled with identifying and grouping other fixed expressions. They also had difficulties classifying formulaic expressions and mis-grouped them. As a result, the study found that pre-service English teachers’ awareness of formulaic language use was moderate.

Emotion in Intercultural Communication– A Sociocultural Model

Emotion has been widely studied in multiple disciplines which include but are not exhaustive to cognitive psychology, neurobiology, anthropology and linguistics. However, emotion in the context of intercultural communication has received far less well-deserved attention. On the other hand, although certain social factors such as context, common ground, formulaic language use and salience are deemed as indispensable helping us to understand the nature of and challenges in intercultural communication, a key concept such as emotion and its role in shaping people’s perceptions, interpretations, attitudes and language use in intercultural contexts is in effect neglected or taken from an intuitive departure, despite a burgeoning growth of literature contributing to conceptualising intercultural communication theories. In this paper, I intend to fill this overlapping gap in the emotion studies and in the intercultural communication research, drawing on findings on the nature of emotion in cognitive psychology, anthropology and linguistics to develop a sociocultural model theorising emotion in intercultural contexts. Naturally occurring intercultural interactions, where Mandarin is used as the language of communication, are employed to illustrate how the model can be applied to analysing emotion, language and culture in intercultural encounters. It is hoped that this paper can contribute to interdisciplinary efforts on theorising emotion in the area of intercultural communication.

Research on the Application of Formulaic Language in College Students' Spoken English Communication

Formulaic language refers to a fixed or semi-fixed multi-word combination between words and sentences. Formulaic language covers a wide range, including idioms, speech programs, grammatical structures, various collocations and so on. If college students can use formulaic language reasonably in spoken communication, it means that they can successfully retrieve relevant prefabricated chunks and phrases from their brains. At the same time, the use of formulaic language makes the sentence structure which is outputted by college students more logical, and the expression more fluent and authentic, which to some extent promotes the college students' spoken communication ability. This paper aims to explore the application of formulaic language in college students' spoken English communication, and how learners' psychology and other factors affect the output of college students' formulaic language, thus affecting the communication atmosphere and effect.

English lexical bundles in a learner corpus of argumentative essays written by Korean university students

This study examines the use of recurrent multi-word sequences (lexical bundles) found in a learner corpus of English argumentative essays written by L1 Korean college students at three different proficiency levels: low, mid and high. After compiling a list of the most frequently occurring four-word bundles in the three sub-corpora of the learner corpus, the study categorises them by structure and identifies which bundles appear in more than one sub-corpus. It then identifies frequent bi-grams embedded in the bundles in each sub-corpus to ascertain how the learners at each proficiency level construct multi-word sequences in context. The findings indicate that more proficient learners favour phrasal bundles, often producing them along with post-modifiers and in longer sentences, and thus approximating norms for academic prose. Lower proficiency learners, however, tend to use more clausal bundles, often including first-person pronouns and employing only a few specific verbs such as want and be, all of which are characteristic of spoken and informal registers. Taken together, these findings reflect L2 development in the use of formulaic language as they describe the uses of lexical bundles that are specific to each proficiency level.

Formulaic language in L1 and advanced L2 English speech: multiword structures in the speech of two Swedish groups compared to a group of L1 English speakers

Abstract The aim of the study was to compare the use of formulaic language, here called multiword structures, in advanced L2 English speech of two Swedish groups with a group of first language (L1) speakers of English. One Swedish group was resident in London and one in Stockholm, thus implying different degrees of exposure to English. Three categories, notably multiword phrases, multiword utterances and metalinguistic multiword structures, were investigated by comparing quantity and distribution. The groups completed two oral tasks, a role play and a retelling task. The results of the Swedish group resident in London were similar to the L1 English group on all measurements of multiword structures in the role play. In the retelling task multiword phrases were significantly fewer in both second language (L2) groups compared to the L1 English group, although there were L2 individuals within the L1 speaker range. Another question concerned the extent to which the three groups used multiword structures which were equivalents, i.e. transferable between English and Swedish. In the retelling task both Swedish groups produced significantly more equivalents than the L1 speakers. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Developing the use of formulaic language for study abroad: a targeted instructional intervention

ABSTRACT This study investigates the immediate and sustained effects of a pre-departure study abroad training on the oral production of L2 Chinese formulaic language across a range of social and transactional interactions. Eighteen upper-intermediate learners of Chinese were assigned to either an instructed or non-instructed group to determine the efficacy of instruction designed to enhance their study abroad year in China and beyond. A three-stage pre-post-delayed longitudinal experimental design was adopted to examine instructional effects over an academic year, elicited by means of a computerised oral task (COT). The assessment was based on quantitative appropriateness ratings and a qualitative analysis of the output. Results show that the instructed group outperformed the control group immediately after the pre-study abroad (pre-SA) instruction, as well as after the year abroad. The significant difference between the two groups, however, decreased after the period abroad as the control group also showed significant improvement without the pre-SA instruction. Nevertheless, the sustained effect of the instruction enabled the experimental group to retain their competitive edge, even after a year in the target language country. The findings demonstrate the longitudinal benefits of pre-SA instruction.

Formulaic language identification model based on GCN fusing associated information.

Formulaic language is a general term for ready-made structures in a language. It usually has fixed grammatical structure, stable language expression meaning and specific use context. The use of formulaic language can coordinate sentence generation in the process of writing and communication, and can significantly improve the idiomaticity and logic of machine translation, intelligent question answering and so on. New formulaic language is generated almost every day, and how to accurately identify them is a topic worthy of research. To this end, this article proposes a formulaic language identification model based on GCN fusing associated information. The innovation is that each sentence is constructed into a graph in which the nodes are part-of-speech features and semantic features of the words in the sentence and the edges between nodes are constructed according to mutual information and dependency syntactic relation. On this basis, the graph convolutional neural network is adopted to extract the associated information between words to mine deeper grammatical features. Therefore, it can improve the accuracy of formulaic language identification. The experimental results show that the model in this article is superior to the classical formulaic language identification model in terms of accuracy, recall and F1-score. It lays a foundation for the follow-up research of formulaic language identification tasks.

On L2 English Learners’ Formulaic Language Use and Spoken English Fluency

Abstract This study explored the distribution of three types of English formulaic language, which involves four categories in L1 Chinese L2 English learners’ speaking performance. In addition, it investigated the relationship between the English learners’ use of formulaic language and their spoken English fluency. A CCA (canonical correlation analysis) was conducted to examine the correlations between two sets of fluency variables (dependent variables) and linguistic variables of English formulaic language use (independent variables). The fluency variable set consists of: (1) temporal indices such as SR (speech rate), AR (articulation rate), MLR (mean length of run), and PTR (phonation time ratio); (2) linguistic variables of English formulaic language like F2R (two-word formulaic sequences/run ratio, B3R (three-word lexical bundles/run ratio), and B4R (four-word lexical bundles/run ratio). These are calculated according to the frequency of the English formulaic language in the speech samples of the participants (n = 86) across three academic levels. The results indicate that the learners’ spoken English fluency is highly related to their use of English formulaic language. Its limitations and future research directions are also discussed.

The importance of raising teachers’ and students’ awareness of pragmatics in German second language writing: a study of the effect of grammatical and lexical errors compared to pragma-linguistic infelicities

One of the new scales in the CEFR Companion Volume is online interaction. The new descriptors cover goal-oriented online transactions, including written correspondence and the use of formulaic language. In Dutch business schools, students learn German for special purposes at B1/2 level: they are expected to master German in a professional context well enough to facilitate interactions and transactions. The question is how their not always flawless attempts at inviting a German colleague to a meeting are received by L1 language users. Is the level of B1/2 German sufficient to avoid bothersome situations? Is these learners’ mastery at B1/2 level sufficient to maintain a good relationship with a German partner? This study investigated whether communicative clashes might occur because of flawed German language use. Ninety-eight German business professionals, all L1 speakers of German, were asked to rate pragma-linguistic infelicities and syntactic, lexical and morphological errors in 16 business e-mails written by Dutch learners of German, using a 7-point Likert scale. The results showed that pragma-linguistic infelicities were considered more bothersome than syntactic, lexical or morphological errors, which suggests that L2 German writing courses should raise more explicit awareness of pragma-linguistic forces in intercultural communication. This idea is in line with recommendations contained in the new Companion Volume. Furthermore, it was studied whether knowledge of the writer’s foreign provenance and Dutch nationality affected the judgement of the German professionals. This was not the case.

‘Did You See That?’—The Role of Repetition and Enhancement on Lexical Bundle Processing in English Learning Materials

Abstract For second-language learners, the use of formulaic language can benefit processing. Previous studies have explored the development of a ‘processing advantage’ for lexical bundles and investigated whether learning materials can be optimized via repetition or enhancement in order to facilitate it. However, studies have tended to consider these factors in isolation, and little is understood about how repetition and enhancement interact as learning occurs. This is the focus of the current study. Japanese learners of English read a series of short stories repeating enhanced or un-enhanced, low-frequency lexical bundles. After each reading, participants performed a phrasal judgement task (PJT) including these lexical bundles, as well as control lexical bundles not presented in the story. Responses were faster to items repeated in the stories, and there was an initial benefit from input enhancement. A post-test indicated that students retained some knowledge of the lexical bundles from both the stories, as well as from items that only appeared in the PJTs. This study shows that including high-frequency lexical bundles in such texts is beneficial to learners.

Exploring lexical bundles in low proficiency level L2 learners’ English writing: an ETS corpus study

Abstract The use of formulaic language in written discourse is an important indicator of language competence. Nonetheless, the features of lexical bundles used by lower proficiency English as a Foreign Language learners have received little attention. The present study addressed this gap by employing a corpus-based method to investigate the quantity, function, and quality of four-word lexical bundles produced by low proficiency L2 English writers with 11 different L1 backgrounds in response to a timed English writing assessment. The investigation was specifically anchored on the data extracted from 1,330 essays using Wordsmith 7.0. Results of the investigation showed (1) an over dependence on writing topic related bundles; (2) an Indo-European L1 language background positively influencing lexical bundle production; (3) an overuse of stance expressions and discourse organizers at the expense of referential expression usage; (4) L1 Japanese, Korean, and Telugu writers producing more accurate lexical bundles and L1 German writers producing fewer accurate lexical bundles; and (5) the frequent use of lexical bundles not leading to highly accurate and appropriate use of lexical bundles. The implications of these results were discussed in connection with foreign language education.

Observing EFL teachers' use of formulaic language in class

Mastering formulaic language is said to be crucially important in second language (L2) learning as it showcases the L2 user’s different levels of competency: linguistic, psycholinguistic, and communicative. Frequent use of these formulaic sequences also makes an L2 speaker sound more native–like. In a language teaching and learning context where English is a foreign language (EFL), the language teacher is the one major resource of spoken language exposure. Therefore, the quality of teacher’s instructions in an EFL classroom clearly has effects on the learner’s language learning process. Mercer (2001) puts it, “[a]ll […] aspects of teacher’s responsibility are reflected in their use of language as the principal tool of their responsibilities” (p. 243). A great deal of research has been devoted to L2 learners and the acquisition of formulaic language, and classroom interaction, but very little attention has been paid to teachers’ use of formulaic sequences in their classrooms. This paper presents a descriptive study with analytical discussion of extracts from four video–recorded lessons conducted by school teachers in different South–east Asian countries. This small-scale study attempts to explore to what extent non–native EFL teachers are familiar with and use formulaic language during class time.

From EFL classroom language to classroom lexicon: Importing formulaic story language into teacher talk

This paper reports on a language activity carried out in an Italian University with student teachers attending a primary education course. The activity was designed to train them to use authentic children’s picturebooks as a source for EFL language learning. It consisted of identifying and ‘noticing’ (Mackey 2006) multiword expressions and ready-made utterances in a number of authentic picturebooks and simulating instances of weaving the picturebook language into the fabric of daily classroom talk. Following the activity, the students wrote individual pieces of reflective writing describing their experience. Comments by student teachers assessed the use of picturebook-derived formulaic language on both their learning and perceived ability to teach English, and revealed much about their pedagogical perspectives on teacher talk. Results suggest that promoting the use of authentic and meaningful language in context can help student teachers conceive of classroom communication as lexicon (a shared communicative practice the rules of which are fully known only by a restricted community of speakers) rather than mere language-based interaction

The use of collocations across proficiency levels: a literature review

This literature review focuses on the use of formulaic language by English as a second language students (L2). Research on the field of phraseology has shown that mastery of formulas is central for fluency and linguistic competence (Ellis, 1996). Studies on the use of formulaic language by native speakers (Ellis et al., 2008) have shown that native speakers process these structures as a single word. Considering the use of formulaic language by L2 students, research has shown that this can be problematic to learners as they do not know the correct word association (Men, 2018). This paper presents a literature review on the studies of formulaic language, more specifically of collocations, used by L2 learners. The first part of this paper deals with the different definitions of collocations, while the second part focuses on studies on collocation use by L2 learners.