Formulaic sequences: a drop in the ocean of constructions or something more significant?*

Abstract

This article investigates how formulaic sequences fi t into a constructionist approach to grammar, which is a major post-Chomskyan family of approaches to linguistic structure. The author considers whether, in this framework, formulaic sequences represent a phenomenon that is suffi ciently diff erent to warrant special status or whether they might best be studied in terms of the larger set of all constructions found in language. Based on data drawn from a large corpus of Wikipedia texts, it is argued that it is extremely diffi cult to form a distinct class of formulaic sequences without creating highly arbitrary boundaries. On the other hand, based on existing theoretical claims that formulaic sequences are the basis of fi rst language acquisition, a marker of profi ciency in a language, critical to the success of communicative acts and key to rapid language processing, it is argued that formulaic sequences as constructions are nevertheless signifi cant enough to be the focus of research, and a theoretical category meriting particular attention. These fi ndings have key repercussions both for research primarily interested in formulaic language and phraseology as well as for construction grammatical research.

(How) is Formulaic Language Universal? Insights from Korean, German and English

“…at the age of X, at the early age of X and at the young age of X as separate types). For a more detailed discussion of internal variability, see Buerki (2016). The actual identification of items of FL from each sub-corpus was conducted in three steps (cf.…”

“Because It Sounds Right”: A Guiding Light of Speaker Knowledge

“…Constructions can appear at different levels of abstraction (Bybee, 2012;Jackendoff, 2013), and specific words can appear in some constructions. Hopper (2004) idiom; collocations that have become frozen have been said to transition into idioms (Buerki, 2016;Bolinger, 1976Bolinger, , 1977. The schema, allowing for the insertion of a novel word in a fixed expression, provides an example of a partially open idiom (Lyons, 1968;Van Lancker Sidtis, Kougentakis, Cameron, Falconer, & Sidtis, 2012;Pullum, 2004).…”

Finding the common ground: phraseological theory and terminology revisited

“…Cheng, Greaves & Warren [2006] define concgrams as follows: "a 'concgram' is all of the permutations of constituency variation and positional variation generated by the association of two or more words" [Cheng et al 2006 As regards formulaic sequence, its original definition proposed by Wray [2002: 9] 6 entails at least two important implications: first, the formulation such as "sequence, continuous or discontinuous, of words or other elements…" points, as Wray herself observes, to the broadest possible inclusion, where "other elements" most probably refer to what Wray later describes as "morpheme equivalent unit" [Wray 2008]; second, the wording such as "prefabricated" pertains to the processing of formulaic sequences as holistic units on the grounds that formulaic language is inherently psychological in nature [Hoey 2005]. Furthermore, formulaic language has now taken a firm hold in the lingua franca of applied linguistics [Wood 2015; Bardovi-Harlig and Stringer 2017] to represent all kinds of formulaic sequences 7 .…”

“…Nonetheless, from a broader perspective, the case on the apparent convergence between Construction Grammar as "the cognitive linguistic approach to syntax" [Croft and Cruse 2004: 225] and phraseology as "the tendency of words, and groups of words, to occur more frequently in some environments than in others" [a view adopted from Hunston 2011: 5] does seem to make sense today, given that idioms are no longer regarded as "complex lexemes" [Lipka 1992] and, most importantly, phraseology itself is seldom viewed as a branch of lexicology dealing with lexicon and lexical semantics of phraseological units, as advocated by 6 "a sequence, continuous or discontinuous, of words or other elements, which is, or appears to be, prefabricated: that is, stored and retrieved whole from memory at the time of use" Wray (2002: 9). 7 See Wray (2002) and Siyanova-Chanturia (2015) for a review. 8 I hereby refer to Goldberg's definition (Goldberg 1995 Dobrovol'skij [2016].…”

“…Thirdly, as Buerki [2016] puts it, 'as the importance of non-idiomatic formulaic sequences was increasingly recognised, new models of the relationship to the rest of linguistic knowledge surfaced [Buerki 2016: 21].' The herein explored links between phraseology and construction grammar, semantics, pragmatics and culture attest to that fact, yet we do recognize that the job done is only akin to that of a tip of an iceberg.…”