Perspectives on Formulaic Language: Acquisition and Communication

297 Pages·2010·2.39 MB·English

by  David Wood

Perspectives on Formulaic Language:
Acquisition and Communication
This page intentionally left blank
Perspectives on Formulaic
Language
Acquisition and Communication
Edited by
David Wood
Continuum International Publishing Group
The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane
11 York Road Suite 704
London SE1 7NX New York, NY 10038
www.continuumbooks.com
© David Wood and contributors 2010
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any
information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the
publishers.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-4411-5047-9 (Hardback)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India
Printed and bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group
Contents
Notes on Contributors vii
Acknowledgements xi
1. F ormulaicity and Usage-based Language: Linguistic,
Psycholinguistic and Acquisitional Manifestations 1
Regina Weinert
Part 1: Formulaic Language in Acquisition and Pedagogy
2. T he Development of Collocation Use in Academic Texts by
Advanced L2 Learners: A Multiple Case Study Approach 23
Jie Li and Norbert Schmitt
3. I diomatically Speaking: Effects of Task Variation on Formulaic
Language in Highly Profi cient Users of L2 French and Spanish 47
Fanny Forsberg and Lars Fant
4. E ffectiveness of Text Memorization in EFL Learning of
Chinese Students 71
Zhenqiong Dai and Yanren Ding
5. L exical Clusters in an EAP Textbook Corpus 88
David Wood
6. A n Investigation of Lexical Bundles in ESP Textbooks and
Electrical Engineering Introductory Textbooks 107
Lin Chen
Part 2 : Identifi cation and Psycholinguistic Processing of
Formulaic Language
7. F ormulaicity in Code-switching: Criteria for Identifying
Formulaic Sequences 129
Kazuhiko Namba
8. H olistic Processing of Regular Four-word Sequences: A Behavioural
and ERP Study of the Effects of Structure, Frequency, and
Probability on Immediate Free Recall 151
Antoine Tremblay and Harald Baayen
vi Contents
9. The Phonology of Formulaic Sequences: A Review 174
Phoebe Ming Sum Lin
10. Processing MWUs: Are MWU Subtypes Psycholinguistically Real? 194
Georgie Columbus
Part 3: Communicative Functions of Formulaic Language
11. A Text in Speech’s Clothing: Discovering Specifi c Functions of
Formulaic Expressions in Beowulf and Blogs 213
Matt Garley, Benjamin Slade, and Marina Terkourafi
12. The Semantic Structure of Arabic Idioms 234
Ashraf Abdou
13. F ormulaicity and Translation: A Cross-corpora Analysis of English
Formulaic Binomials and Their Italian Translations 257
Salvatore Giammarresi
Index 275
Notes on Contributors
Ashraf Abdou has obtained degrees in Arabic language and Islamic studies
and in Linguistics from Cairo University. He also has an MA in Teaching
Arabic as a Foreign Language from The American University in Cairo, and
a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Manchester, where his disserta-
tion was a corpus-based study of Arabic idioms. His teaching experience
includes Arabic linguistics and Arabic as a foreign language at these three
universities.
Harald Baayen is a Professor at the Department of Linguistics at the Univer-
sity of Alberta. His research interests include quantitative linguistics, lexical
statistics, exploratory data analysis, stylometry, mixed-effects modeling,
morphology and morphological processing.
Lin Chen worked as an electrical engineer for eight years in China before
beginning her graduate studies in applied linguistics at Carleton University,
where she is now a lecturer in English for Academic Purposes. Her research
interests include formulaic language, corpus linguistics, and discourse
analysis.
Georgie Columbus is a phraseologist working in corpus linguistics and
psycholinguistics. Her secondary interests lie in the variation in discourse
markers between English varieties. Georgie is currently researching at the
University of Alberta, Canada, on the processing of multiword units in
native and non-native speakers.
Yanren Ding is Professor of English, School of Foreign Studies, Nanjing
University. His research interests include second language acquisition,
discourse analysis and language teaching methodology.
Lars Fant is a Professor in the department of Spanish and Portuguese at
Stockholm University. He has taught Romance languages in a wide variety
of contexts, and has researched and published on many aspects of second
viii Notes on Contributors
language use including cross-cultural communication, discourse analysis
and pragmatics, and formulaic language.
Zhenqiong Dai is an English instructor, School of Foreign Studies, Nanjing
University. Her research and teaching interests centre around formulaic
language and the role of memorization in language acquisition. Her article
in this volume, co-authored with Yanren Ding, is based on her graduate
work.
Fanny Forsberg is a researcher and lecturer in French at Stockholm
University’s department of French, Italian and Classical Languages. She has
researched and published extensively on formulaic language and high-level
profi ciency in second language use.
Matt Garley is a PhD candidate in Linguistics at the University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign, where he serves as editor of Studies in the Linguistic
Sciences. His research interests include sociolinguistics, language contact,
the language of hip-hop, and computer-mediated communication. He is
currently planning a dissertation project on linguistic borrowings and the
construction of identity in the German hip-hop fan community.
Salvatore Giammarresi holds a PhD in Synchronic and Diachronic
Linguistics from the University of Palermo, Italy. He is the site creator and
moderator of the Formulaic Language Research Network (www.efl arn.ning.
com). His academic interests include formulaicity, translation technology,
translation theory and localization. He is a lecturer at the University of
Palermo, Italy, teaching localization, computer assisted translation tools
and global marketing. Professionally Salvatore is currently serving as the
Vice President of Products at a web-based company in San Francisco.
Jie Li is a PhD student at the University of Nottingham. Her academic inter-
ests include vocabulary learning and teaching, formulaic language, corpus
linguistics, and foreign/second language acquisition. Her thesis focuses
on second language (L2) learner acquisition and use of formulaic language
in academic writing. She has recently published an article on Chinese
advanced L2 learner’s acquisition process of lexical phrases in the Journal
of Second Language Writing.
Phoebe Ming Sun Lin is a researcher at the School of English Studies of
the University of Nottingham, UK. At the time of writing, she is completing
Notes on Contributors ix
a large study which provides a comprehensive description of the prosody of
formulaic sequences. Her recent publications explore formulaic language
from the perspectives of phonology, corpus linguistics and second language
teaching and learning. Her wider research interests include formulaic
language, intonation, corpus linguistics and spoken English.
Kazuhiko Namba is Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics at Kyoto
Sangyo University. His main research interest is the role of formulaic lan-
guage in bilingual children’s language acquisition and the structural aspects
of code-switching. He acquired his PhD and MA at Cardiff University. He
taught English in Japanese secondary schools for over 20 years and is
raising his two children as English-Japanese bilinguals.
Norbert Schmitt is Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of
Nottingham. He is interested in all aspects of second language vocabulary,
including vocabulary acquisition, formulaic language, vocabulary testing,
the relationship between reading and listening and vocabulary learning,
and implicit and explicit vocabulary knowledge. He has most recently com-
pleted a vocabulary research manual, to be published by Palgrave Press.
Benjamin Slade is a PhD student at the University of Illinois, currently pre-
paring a dissertation on the history of Sinhala interrogative constructions
under the direction of Hans Henrich Hock. His earlier work was on the
development of do-support in English and the evolution of Indo-Aryan
compound verbs. Forthcoming work includes a study of dragon-slaying for-
mulae in early Indo-European, to appear in Historische Sprachforschung.
Antoine Tremblay obtained his BA in Hispanic Studies and MA in Spanish
Morphology from Laval University, Quebec, Canada, and his PhD in Psy-
cholinguistics from the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. He is
currently a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University Medical Center,
Washington DC, in the Department of Neuroscience. His research focuses
on the processing of compositional multi-word sequences in the auditory
and visual modalities using behavioral and brain imaging methods.
Marina Terkourafi is Assistant Professor in Linguistics, University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign. She has research interests in post-Gricean prag-
matics, theories of (im)politeness, language contact and change, language
and ideology, and construction grammar(s). Her work in these areas has
appeared in journals such as Cognition & Emotion, Diachronica, Journal of