Formulaic Genres

A preliminary investigation into the use of fixed formulaic sequences as a marker of authorship

“…The results support Kuiper's (2009) research; just as individual variation was found in the checkout data, individual variation was found in the author corpus, although not with the same 'signature' potential-that is, no formulaic sequence was used rarely overall but consistently by only one author. It is likely that the routinized nature of operating a checkout made individual differences more marked than was possible in the less routine act of writing narratives.…”

“…This is clearly useful for the claim that formulaic sequences hold potential as a marker of authorship, particularly when we take into account that other aspects of linguistic history such as exposure, experience, and participation in various communities of practice are also likely to influence individual formulaic inventories (Wray, 2002). However, Schmitt et al's conclusion is based on the results of one study which included only 34 native speakers (an additional 45 non-native speaker participants took part in the study but the results have not been discussed here) but it is interesting that in a more general context, idiolectal differences were still found lending further support to Kuiper's (2009) context-specific research.…”

“…Kuiper (2009) offers insight into individual variation in the use of formulaic sequences during routine interactions, specifically, ritual talk at the supermarket checkout. Kuiper was interested 'in the formulaic inventory and discourse structure used by checkout operators' (p.99-100) but not with sociolinguistic variation.…”

In support of multiword unit classifications: Corpus and human rating data validate phraseological classifications of three different multiword unit types

“…Taxonomic, syntactic and semantic theory on MWUs has had a longer history than the computationally-driven studies of frequent word strings. Researchers in theories of MWUs include Weinreich (1969), Nunberg (1978), Nunberg, Wasow and Sag (1994), and Wasow, Sag and Nunberg (1980) on idioms, Mel'čuk (1995Mel'čuk ( , 1996Mel'čuk ( , 1998 and Howarth (1996Howarth ( , 1998 on restricted collocations and fixed phrases, Pawley and Syder (1983) and DeCarrico (1986, 1992) on "routinized" formulae, and Kuiper (1996Kuiper ( , 2000Kuiper ( , 2006Kuiper ( , 2009 and Wray (2002Wray ( , 2008 on formulaic language in a broader sense. In experimental studies, however, some researchers use as stimuli MWUs that appear to be a mix of MWU subtypes and that would be classified as different types according to certain linguistic taxonomies.…”

Visual representation of phraseological image

“…Stylistic changes of PUs in pictures is an issue that has long fascinated researchers (for example, Mieder 1989Mieder , 1993Forceville 1991Forceville , 1994Forceville , 1996Forceville , 2008Naciscione 2001aNaciscione , 2005Lundmark 2003Lundmark , 2005Stöckl 2004;Fiedler 2007;Burger 2007Burger , 2008Kuiper 2009). …”