The Prosody Of Formulaic Sequences

To apply the same approaches to analysing spoken and written formulaic language is problematic; to do so masks the fact that the contextual meaning of spoken formulaic language is encoded, to a large extent, in its prosody. In The Prosody of Formulaic Sequences, Phoebe Lin offers a new perspective on formulaic language, arguing that while past research often treats formulaic language as a lexical phenomenon, the phonological aspect of it is a more fundamental facet. This book draws its conclusions from three original, empirical studies of spoken formulaic language, assessing intonation unit boundaries as well as features such as tempo and stress placement. Across all studies, Lin considers questions of methodology and conceptual framework. The corpus-based descriptions of prosody outlined in this book not only deepen our understanding of the nature of formulaic language but have important implications for English Language Teaching and automatic speech synthesis.

Formulaic sequences (FS) are now recognized as an essential element of language use. However, research on FS has generally been limited to a focus on description, or on the place of FS in L1 acquisition. This volume opens new directions in FS research, concentrating on how FS are acquired and processed by the mind, both in the L1 and L2. The ten original studies in the volume illustrate the L2 acquisition of FS, the relationship between L1 and L2 FS, the relationship between corpus recurrence of FS and their psycholinguistic reality, the processes involved in reading FS, and pedagogical issues in teaching FS. The studies use a wide range of methodologies, many of them innovative, and thus the volume serves as a model for future research in the area. The volume begins with three survey chapters offering a background on the characteristics and measurement of FS.

Understanding Formulaic Language: A Second Language Acquisition Perspective brings together leading scholars to provide a state-of-the-art, interdisciplinary account of the acquisition, processing, and use of formulaic language. Contributors present three distinct but complementary perspectives on the study of formulaic language – cognitive/psycholinguistic, socio-cultural/pragmatic, and pedagogical – to highlight new work as well as directions for future work. This book is an essential resource for established researchers and graduate students in second language acquisition and pedagogy, corpus and cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and pragmatics.

This edited collection draws together diverse international work on formulaic language such as such as idioms, collocations, lexical bundles and phrasal verbs.

This is the first book to address formulaic language directly and provide a foundation of knowledge for graduates and researchers in early stages of study of this important language phenomenon. It is also suitable for students of linguistics, applied linguistics, and language teacher education. The information that currently exists is scattered throughout articles and book chapters across a range of subfields of linguistics and applied linguistics. Over the past few decades there has been a steadily increasing interest and research focus on the phenomenon of formulaic language in the fields of linguistics and applied linguistics. Slowly, a consistent definition has emerged, centring around the idea that formulaic sequences are multi-word units with specific meanings or functions, and some evidence points to their being processed mentally as wholes. Researchers from diverse backgrounds have identified the nature and roles of formulaic sequences in language acquisition and production, in the construction of text and discourse, in spoken and written language, and in language teaching. The increasing volume, diversity, and complexity of the state of knowledge about this emerging area of study is marshalled by this intelligent and well-written book.

This book is the second of the two-volume collection of papers on formulaic language. The collection is among the first in the field. The authors of the papers in this volume represent a diverse group of international scholars in linguistics and psychology. The language data analyzed come from a variety of languages, including Arabic, Japanese, Polish, and Spanish, and include analyses of styles and genres within these languages. While the first volume focuses on the very definition of linguistic formulae and on their grammatical, semantic, stylistic, and historical aspects, the second volume explores how formulae are acquired and lost by speakers of a language, in what way they are psychologically real, and what their functions in discourse are. Since most of the papers are readily accessible to readers with only basic familiarity with linguistics, the book may be used in courses on discourse structure, pragmatics, semantics, language acquisition, and syntax, as well as being a resource in linguistic research.

This book is the first of the two-volume collection of papers on formulaic language. The collection is among the first ones in the field. The book draws attention to the ritualized, repetitive side of language, which to some estimates make up over 50% of spoken and written text. While in the linguistic literature, the creative and innovative aspects of language have been amply highlighted, conventionalized, pre-fabricated, “off-the-shelf” expressions have been paid less attention – an imbalance that this book attempts to remedy. The first of the two volumes addresses the very concept of formulaic language and provides studies that explore the grammatical and semantic properties of formulae, their stylistic distribution within languages, and their evolution in the course of language history. Since most of the papers are readily accessible to readers with only basic familiarity with linguistics, besides being a resource in linguistic research, the book may be used in courses on discourse structure, pragmatics, semantics, language acquisition, and syntax, as well as being a resource in linguistic research.

This book takes a new and holistic approach to fluency in English speech and differentiates between productive, perceptive, and nonverbal fluency. The in-depth corpus-based description of productive fluency points out major differences of how fluency is established in native and nonnative speech. It also reveals areas in which even highly advanced learners of English still deviate strongly from the native target norm and in which they have already approximated to it. Based on these findings, selected learners are subjected to native speakers' ratings of seven perceptive fluency variables in order to test which variables are most responsible for a perception of oral proficiency on the sides of the listeners. Finally, language-pedagogical implications derived from these findings for the improvement of fluency in learner language are presented. This book is conceptually and methodologically relevant for corpus-linguistics, learner corpus research and foreign language teaching and learning.