Perspectives on Formulaic Language

Formulaic sequences are more or less fixed word combinations such as idioms, collocations, lexical bundles, phrasal verbs and so on. Study in this area has grown over the past fifteen years, despite the fact that there are no academic journals or conferences devoted to this topic.

This edited collection is an attempt to draw together the diverse international work on formulaic language. It features an introduction by Dr. Regina Weinert, a pioneer and expert in the study of formulaic language in acquisition. The authors have an international scope, from China and Italy to Armenia, Canada and Britain. The book is divided into three sections: Formulaic Language in Acquisition and Pedagogy; Identification and Psycholinguistic Processing of Formulaic Language; Communicative Functions of Formulaic Language. The topics of the papers are as varied as the geographic locations of the authors - critical discourse analysis, psycholinguistics, memorization, corpus analysis, specific languages such as Arabic, and even Beowulf and blogging language. This volume represents a step forward for the study of formulaic language, offering diverse, often previously unexplored perspectives from international researchers, advancing knowledge in innovative ways.

It makes a fresh contribution the growing number of works on this topic and will appeal to researchers and academics working with formulaic language throughout linguistics.

Auteur

David Wood teaches applied linguistics at Carleton University, Canada, where his research interests lie in formulaic language, acquisition of L2 spoken language and academic discourse, and language teacher education. He has taught English language and applied linguistics in Canada, Greece, and Japan.

Contenu

1. The contribution of formulaic language to fundamental debates in linguisticsn, Regina Weinert (University of Sheffield)
   Part 1: Formulaic Language in Acquisition and Pedagogy
   2. The development of collocation use in academic texts by advanced L2 learners: A multiple case study approach, Jie Li and Norbert Schmitt (University of Nottingham, UK)
   
   3. Idiomatically speaking: Effects of task variation on formulaic language in highly proficient users of L2 French and Spanish, Fanny Forsberg and Lars Fant (Stockholm University, Sweden)
   4. Effectiveness of text memorization in EFL Learning of Chinese students, Zhenqiong Dai and Yanren Ding (Nanjing University, China)
   5. Lexical clusters in an EAP textbook corpus, David Wood (Carleton University, Canada)
   6. An investigation of lexical bundles in ESP textbooks and electrical engineering introductory textbooks, Lin Chen (Carleton University, USA)
      Part 2: Identification and Psycholinguistic Processing of Formulaic Language
   7. Formulaicity in code-switching: Criteria for identifying formulaic sequences, Kazuhiko Namba (Kyoto Sangyo University, Japan)
   8. Holistic processing of regular four-word sequences: A behavioral and ERP study of the effects of structure, frequency, and probability on immediate recall, Antoine Tremblay and Harald Baayen (University of Alberta, Canada) 9. The phonology of formulaic sequences: A review, Phoebe Ming Sum Lin (University of Nottingham, UK)
   9. Processing MWUs: Are MWU subtypes psycholinguistically real? Georgie Columbus (University of Alberta, Canada)
      Part 3: Communicative Functions of Formulaic Language
   10. A text in speech's clothing: Discovering specific functions of formulaic expressions in Beowulf and blogs, Matt Garley, Benjamin Slade, and Marina Terkourafi (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA)
   11. The semantic structure of Arabic idioms, Ashraf Abdou(University of Manchester, UK)
   12. Formulaicity and translation: A cross-corpora analysis of English formulaic binomials and their Italian translations, Salvatore Giammarresi (University of Palermo, Italy)
       Index