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Formulaic language Theories and methods Edited by Aleksandar Trklja Łukasz Grabowski language Phraseology and Multiword Expressions 5 science press PhraseologyandMultiwordExpressions Serieseditors AgataSavary(UniversityofTours,Blois,France),ManfredSailer(GoetheUniversityFrankfurt a.M.,Germany),YannickParmentier(UniversityofLorraine,France),VictoriaRosén(Universityof Bergen,Norway),MikeRosner(UniversityofMalta,Malta). Inthisseries: 1. ManfredSailer&StellaMarkantonatou(eds.).Multiwordexpressions:Insightsfroma multilingualperspective. 2. StellaMarkantonatou,CarlosRamisch,AgataSavary&VeronikaVincze(eds.).Multiword expressionsatlengthandindepth:ExtendedpapersfromtheMWE2017workshop. 3. YannickParmentier&JakubWaszczuk(eds.).Representationandparsingofmultiword expressions:Currenttrends. 4. SchulteimWalde,Sabine&EvaSmolka(eds.).Theroleofconstituentsinmultiword expressions:Aninterdisciplinary,crosslingualperspective. 5. Trklja,Aleksandar&ŁukaszGrabowski(eds.).Formulaiclanguage:Theoriesandmethods. ISSN:26253127 Formulaic language Theories and methods Edited by Aleksandar Trklja Łukasz Grabowski language science press AleksandarTrklja&ŁukaszGrabowski(eds.).2021.Formulaiclanguage: Theoriesandmethods(PhraseologyandMultiwordExpressions5).Berlin: LanguageSciencePress. Thistitlecanbedownloadedat: http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/304 ©2021,theauthors PublishedundertheCreativeCommonsAttribution4.0Licence(CCBY4.0): http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ISBN:978-3-96110-310-2(Digital) 978-3-98554-006-8(Hardcover) ISSN:2625-3127 DOI:10.5281/zenodo.4727623 Sourcecodeavailablefromwww.github.com/langsci/304 Collaborativereading:paperhive.org/documents/remote?type=langsci&id=304 Coverandconceptofdesign:UlrikeHarbort Typesetting:SebastianNordhoff,FelixKopecky Proofreading:AlexandruCraevschi,AmirGhorbanpour,AniefonDaniel, BojanaBašaragin,BrettReynolds,DylanTemel,ElenLeFoll,HellaOlbertz, IkmiNurOktavianti,JeroenvandeWeijer,LachlanMackenzie,MartenStelling, MatthewWindsor,JeanNitzke,SarahDaniel,StefanHartmann,Tihomir Rangelov,ValeriaQuochi Fonts:Libertinus,Arimo,DejaVuSansMono Typesettingsoftware:XƎLATEX LanguageSciencePress xHain GrünbergerStr.16 10243Berlin,Germany langsci-press.org StorageandcataloguingdonebyFUBerlin Contents Introduction AleksandarTrklja&ŁukaszGrabowski iii I Newtheoreticalandmethodologicalinsightsintoformulaic language 1 Predictabilityandprefabstatus:Thecaseofadjective+noun sequencesinEnglish JoanBybee&RicardoNapoleãodeSouza 3 2 Cascadingcollocations:Collocadesascorrelatesofformulaic language RichardForsyth 31 3 Exploringthevalencyofcollocationalchains PiotrPęzik 53 II Formulaiclanguageinlanguagelearningcontexts 4 Pathstoformulaicity:HowdoL2speakersinternalisenewformulaic material? StephenF.Cutler 81 5 FormulaicsequenceswithideationalfunctionsinL1studentand expertacademicwritinginEnglish YingWang 113 III Formulaiclanguageindiscoursestudiesandtranslation 6 Readingdiscoursesthroughtheirphraseology:ThecaseofBrexit AndreasBuerki 141 AleksandarTrklja&ŁukaszGrabowski 7 Grammarpatternsasanexploratorytoolforstudyingformulaicityin English-to-Polishtranslation:Acorpus-basedstudy ŁukaszGrabowski&NicholasGroom 171 8 God,theDevil,andChrist:AcorpusstudyofRussiansyntactic idiomsandtheirEnglishandFinnishtranslationcorrespondences MikhailMikhailov 191 Index 224 ii Introduction Aleksandar Trklja UniversitätInnsbruck Łukasz Grabowski UniversityofOpole Thenotionofformulaicityhasreceivedincreasingattentionindisciplinesand areasasdiverseaslinguistics,literarystudies,arttheoryandarthistory.Inrecent years, linguistic studies of formulaicity have been flourishing (e.g. Wray 2002; 2008; 2009; Schmitt & Carter 2004; Wood 2010b,a; 2015; Kecskes 2016; Myles & Cordier2017;Piirainenetal.2020),andtheverynotionofformulaicityhasbeen approachedfromvariousmethodologicalandtheoreticalperspectivesandwith variouspurposesinmind,beitdescriptive,exploratoryorapplied. The object of investigation in linguistic studies are multiword expressions (MWE) but individual approaches and models differ in how MWE are defined andidentifiedinlanguage.Forthesereasons,itwouldbewrongtoclaimthatall linguisticstudiesofformulaicityconstituteauniformfieldofresearch.Thereis nosuchathingas’formulaicitylinguistics’.Linguisticformulaicityhasbecome a superordinate term for the view that a large proportion of natural language consists of repetitive lexical units. This makes MWE somehow special with re- specttoalternativelinguisticunitsofanalysisthathavetheoreticalfoundations informalsyntactic,semanticorlexicalstructures.Suchstructurescanbeandare oftenincludedinthestudyoflinguisticformulaicitybuttheydonotprovidethe minimumnecessaryconditionsagainstwhichMWEaresetaslinguisticunits.In fact, there are authors who proposed new approaches or models that deny the existence of such structures. The minimum assumption shared by all studies of linguisticformulaicityisthataMWEisconsideredaunitbecauseitisalinguis- tic expression that has been repeatedly reused. The very fact that a linguistic expressionisre-usedacrossdifferentsituationsandbydifferentlanguageusers constitutesagoodgroundtotreatitasaunitofanalysis.Itisthereforenowonder thatthemainfocusinthestudyoflinguisticformulaicityisontheinvestigation Aleksandar Trklja & Łukasz Grabowski. 2021. Introduction. In Aleksandar Trklja&ŁukaszGrabowski(eds.),Formulaiclanguage:Theoriesandmethods, iii–viii.Berlin:LanguageSciencePress.DOI:10.5281/zenodo.4727659 AleksandarTrklja&ŁukaszGrabowski of the effect repetition has on various language issues such as idiomaticity, lan- guage acquisition, formation of social discourses, translation-related issues etc. As one can see, the novelty of these studies does not lie in the introduction of newissuestheyaddressbutratherinanewtreatmentofestablishedissues. Linguists of various schools have studied linguistic formulaicity using differ- ent approaches and research perspectives, and with different purposes in mind. In an attempt to provide a useful generalization and conceptual clarification, Gałkowski(2006:163–164)arguesthatitispossibletodistinguishbetweenthree major approaches to linguistic formulaicity, namely a linguistic, psycholinguis- ticandsociolinguisticone.Thefocusofthepurelylinguisticapproachisonthe investigationofformulaicityintermsoflexicalandgrammaticalcategoriesiden- tifiedprimarilyusingformalgrammaticalorfunctionallexicalcriteria.Thepsy- cholinguistic approach is primarily concerned with the study of how linguistic data is stored, processed as well as retrieved from the mental lexicon. Finally, thesociolinguisticapproachexploressituationalandculturalaspectstiedtothe use of formulaic language (Gałkowski, ibid.). In reality, most studies combine theseapproachesasillustratedinSchmitt&Carter(2004);Wood(2010b,a;2015); Wray (2002) or Underwood et al. (2004); Piirainen et al. (2020), among others. Also,therehasbeenaplethoraofresearchconductedinrecentyearsbyspecial- istsincorpusandcomputationallinguistics,whostudyformulaiclanguagewith primarily applied purposes in mind, such as development of natural language processing tools (NLP) or machine translation tools, fine-tuning textual classi- fication methods etc. (cf. Forsyth & Grabowski 2015; Pęzik 2018). Given such a proliferation of research perspectives, it is no surprise that formulaic language hasbeendefined,labelledandoperationalizedinmanydifferentways(cf.Wray & Perkins 2000; Wray 2002; 2009), and each approach brings new insights into this interesting, yet at the same time, not fully and comprehensively explored phenomenon.Thisobservationprovidedthemainrationaleforthepresentvol- ume.Weinvitedspecialiststhatcoverthewholespectrumofrelevantissuesand thusshowcasetheirstate-of-the-artresearch. Thus,wepresentaselectionofstudiesintoformulaiclanguagearrangedinto complementarysections.Thefirstsectionwiththreechapterspresentsnewtheo- reticalandmethodologicalinsightsaswellastheirpracticalapplicationinthede- velopmentofcustom-designedsoftwaretoolsforidentificationandexploration of formulaic language in texts. The second section with two chapters presents examples of innovative research into formulaic language in language learning contexts. Finally, the third section with three chapters showcases research on formulaic language conducted primarily from corpus linguistic, discourse stud- iesandtranslationstudiesperspectives. iv Introduction The first chapter by Joan Bybee and Ricardo Napoleão de Souza focuses on the relation between frequency effects typical of linguistic prefabrication and phonetic effects. By exploring a sample of adjective-noun sequences extracted from a conversational corpus, Bybee and de Souza show that certain phonetic effects,suchasvowelduration,correspondtoconventionalizedstructuresfound inprefabricatedexpressions.Theyalsoarguethatphoneticeffectsarepromising in view of future studies focusing on the notion of conventionality of prefabri- catedexpressions.Theauthorsdemonstratethatprefabricatedexpressionscon- stitutetheconventionalmeansofreferringtotheseentitiesorconceptsofsome culturalimportancedespitebeingsemanticallycompositional.Inaddition,they showthatprefabsformclustersofsemanticallyrelatedwordsequencesandthat theycancontributetocreativityinlanguageuse. RichardForsythlooksintoformulaiclanguagefromacorpus-drivenperspec- tiveandproposesasetofcomputationalprocedurestoquantifythedegreeoffor- mulaic language in individual texts and language corpora. Forsyth implements hisapproachintoacustom-designedfreelyavailablesoftwarewritteninPython andshows-usinganadditionalcriterionofcoverage-hown-gramsofvarious lengthsemergefromthedataandfacilitatedeterminationofthedegreetowhich textsarepermeatedwithrecurrentsequencesofwords. The chapter by Piotr Pęzik focuses on the identification of prefabricated ex- pressions in dependency-annotated corpora. More precisely, he investigates re- strictionsonthevalencyofbinarycollocationsandtheirtendencytoberegularly subsumedbylargercollocationalchains.SpecificexamplesfromPolishandEn- glish are followed by a presentation of Treelets software, where the Author’s approachhasbeenimplemented,whichillustratesinpracticaltermshowrecur- rentmulti-worditemsmaybesystematicallyexploredusingdependency-based methods. The second section opens with a contribution by Stephen Cutler, who deals withanimportantproblemofhownewformulaiclanguageisacquiredandstored byL2learnersofEnglish.Inthesestudies,twodifferentlearningpathsarecon- trasted:fusion(operationalizedthroughafocusonthesequence’selementsand structure)versusholisticacquisition(operationalizedthroughafocusonthespo- ken sound form of the sequence as a whole). Cutler argues that the findings providefurthersupporttotheclaimthatregularretrievalandsimplecorrective feedbackhelpconsolidaterecallofthesequenceslearntbyL2learners. YingWangundertakesasuccessfulattemptatacomparisonofideationalfunc- tionsofformulaiclanguageinnativestudentandexpertacademicwriting.The chapter presents unique features of formulaic sequences identified in each text varietyandshowsthatnativestudentwritingismorecharacteristicofeveryday v AleksandarTrklja&ŁukaszGrabowski andhighlyidiomaticformulaicsequences,amongothers,whileexpertacademic writing abounds in formulaic language associated with research and scientific argumentation.Inconclusion,YingWangpresentsaninformativediscussionon howtheresearchfindingstranslateintoformalinstruction. The last section of the volume starts with a chapter by Andreas Buerki, who showshowchangesinsocialdiscoursearereflectedinphraseology.Takingthe 2016 referendum on the United Kingdom’s membership in the European Union asreflectedinalarge,tailor-madecorpusofmediatexts,Buerkiidentifiesvarious discursivestrategiesreflectedinrecurrentphraseologiesandcomparestheiruse across time and specific topics. The results obtained in the study demonstrate how phraseological units reflect specific ideological positions. In addition, the presentdataindicatesthatformulaicityplaysanimportantroleintheBrexitdis- course because it is more formulaic than the comparable discourse. Finally, the chaptercastsnewmethodologicalinsightsintohowphraseology,andformulaic- ityingeneral,canbeusedindiscourseanalyticalresearch. Łukasz Grabowski and Nicholas Groom undertake an attempt at employing theconceptofgrammarpatternsindescriptiveresearchonformulaiclanguage inEnglish-to-Polishtranslation.TheiraimistoverifywhetherthePolishequiv- alentsarerealizedwiththesamelevelofregularity.Thedetailedfindingsshow that grammar patterns can be useful as a unit of analysis and a starting point forexplorationofformulaicityintranslation,andthattheymaycastmorelight ontosomemoregeneraldifferencesbetweensemanticsandpragmaticsinsource textsandtranslations. Finally, the last chapter in the volume, by Mikhail Mikhailov, takes under scrutiny the concept of syntactic idioms and explores through a corpus linguis- tic analysis the structure, meaning and use of the Russian construction N-s-N and its English and Finnish matches. These counterparts are identified in par- allel corpora. Mikhailov argues that the Construction Grammar approach used inhisstudyhelpsmakesyntacticidiomsmoreexplicitfordescriptivepurposes, alsowhenexploredwiththeuseofparallelandcomparablecorpora. Webelievethatsuchaselectionoforiginalstudiescollectedinthisbookwill providemoreinsightsintoafascinatingphenomenonofformulaicityinlanguage explored from both a systemic and textual angle. We sincerely hope that the volumewillthereforecomeinusefulforanyoneinterestedinformulaiclanguage, frombothatheoreticalandpracticalperspective. Obviously enough, this volume would not have been possible without many people involved in its preparation, compilation and production. First of all, we wouldliketothanktheAuthorsofthechaptersforacceptingourinvitationand for further smooth collaboration through the entire production process, from vi
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