Formulaicity in constrained communication An intermodal approach

Abstract

In this exploratory study bordering on corpus linguistics, formulaic language and studies on constrained communication (focusing on translation, interpreting, and L2) we aim to verify whether constrained texts found in the Polish-English component of an intermodal EPTIC corpus differ from native texts in terms of use of adjacent word combinations commonly known as bigrams and whether similar patterns can be found across spoken and written registers. To that end, we fit a Poisson regression model with fixed and random effects. The results show that the translated language variety contributes to the higher number of the most frequent bigram types in both spoken and written registers, and that the number of frequent bigrams in texts generally increases when the speech/source speech is delivered impromptu, but the effect is significant only for the written register. The findings reveal the considerable impact of individual variation on formulaicity as most of the bigram variation within both models is explained by text-specific random variables rather than fixed variables.