Cover not available
Part of
Fixed Expressions: Building language structure and social action
Edited by Ritva Laury and Tsuyoshi Ono
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 315] 2020
► pp. 71–98

Chapter 4
Formulaicity without expressed multiword units

| University of California, Los Angeles

In this chapter, I investigate three types of formulaic structure that can be characterized as underspecified with elliptical materials and lacking the kind of expressed multiword units as typically conceived. The elliptical or source structures are shown to manifest in different unit sizes: (a) simple constituents such as modifiers/quantifiers, (b) phrasal units of various types, and (c) larger clausal units or complex turn-constructional units and the use of conjunctions. As elliptical forms of formulaic expressions are found at multiple levels of linguistic structure, this chapter raises a range of theoretical questions concerning formulaicity, including the prevailing conceptualization of formulaic language or fixed expression, proportions of prefabricated constructions in human language, mechanisms of storage and retrieval, as well as cross-linguistic properties of formulaic language.

Keywords: multiword unit, elliptical form, underspecification, fixed expression, formulaicity, semantic change, adverbials, connectives
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methodology and data
  • 3.Patterns of underspecified fixed expressions
    • 3.1Underspecified modifier/qualifier
      • 3.1.1Amelioration
      • 3.1.2Degradation
    • 3.2Underspecified phrasal structures
    • 3.3Underspecified clausal and other larger structure
  • 4.Summary and discussion
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 10 December 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.315.04tao
References
Barlow, Michael
1998 The Corpus of Spoken Professional American-English (CSPA). Houston: Athelstan.Google Scholar
Barth-Weingarten, Dagmar, and Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen
2002 “On the Development of Final Though: A Case of Grammaticalization?” In New Reflections on Grammaticalization, ed. by Ilse Wischer and Gabriele Diewald, 345–361. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Biber, Douglas, and Susan Conrad
1999 “Lexical Bundles in Conversation and Academic Prose.” In Out of Corpora: Studies in Honor of Stig Johansson, ed. by Hilde Hasselard and Signe Oksefjell, 181–189. Amsterdam: Rodopi.Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas, Susan Conrad, and Viviana Cortes
2003 “Lexical Bundles in Speech and Writing: An Initial Taxonomy.” In Corpus Linguistics by the Lune, ed. by Andrew Wilson, Paul Rayson, and Tony McEnery, 71–92. Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad, and Edward Finegan
1999 The Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Longman.Google Scholar
Bolinger, Dwight
1972 Degree Words. The Hague: Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bybee, Joan
2002 “Phonological Evidence for Exemplar Storage of Multiword Sequences.” SSLA 24: 215–221. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2003 “Mechanisms of Change in Grammaticization: The Role of Frequency.” In The Handbook of Historical Linguistics, ed. by Brian D. Joseph and Richard D. Janda, 602–623. Oxford: Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2006 “From Usage to Grammar: The Mind's Response to Repetition.” Language 82 (4): 529–551. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2007 Frequency of Use and the Organization of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2010 Language, Usage and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bybee, Joan, and Paul Hopper
2001 “Introduction to Frequency and the Emergence of Linguistic Structure.” In Frequency and the Emergence of Linguistic Structure, ed. by Joan Bybee and Paul Hopper, 1–24. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bybee, Joan, and Joanne Scheibmann
1999 “The Effects of Usage of Degrees of Constituency: The Reduction of ‘Don’t’ in English.” Linguistics 37 (4): 575–96. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bybee Joan, and Sandra A. Thompson
1997 “Three Frequency Effects in Syntax.” Berkeley Linguistic Society 23: 378–388. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Drake, A. Veronika
2015 “Indexing Uncertainty: The Case of Turn-final Or .” Research on Language and Social Interaction 48 (3): 301–318. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Du Bois, John W., Wallace L. Chafe, Charles Meyer, Sandra A. Thompson, Robert Englebretson, and Nii Martey
2000–2005 Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English, Parts 1–4. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium.Google Scholar
Du Bois, John W., Stephan Schuetze-Coburn, Susanna Cumming, and Danae Paolino
1993 “Outline of Discourse Transcription.” In Talking Data: Transcription and Coding Methods for Discourse Research, ed. by Jane A. Edwards and Martin D. Lampert, 45–89. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Erman, Britt, and Beatrice Warren
2000 “The Idiom Principle and the Open Choice Principle.” Text 20 (1): 29–62. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Evans, Nicholas
2007 “Insubordination and Its Uses.” In Finiteness: Theoretical and Empirical Foundations, ed. by Irina Nikolaeva, 366–431. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Evans, Nicholas, and Honoré Watanabe
(eds) 2016 Insubordination. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Firth, J. R.
1957 Papers in Linguistics 1934～1951. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Fox, Barbara
2007 “Principles Shaping Grammatical Practices: An Exploration.” Discourse Studies 9 (3): 299–318. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Frank-Job, Barbara
2006 “A Dynamic-Interactional Approach to Discourse Markers.” In Approaches to Discourse Particles, ed.by Kerstin Fischer, 359–374. Amsterdam: Elsevier.Google Scholar
Goodwin, Charles
1981 Conversational Organization: Interaction between Speakers and Hearers. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
2013 “The Co-Operative, Transformative Organization of Human Action and Knowledge.” Journal of Pragmatics 46 (1): 8–23. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Halliday, Michael A.
1966 ‘‘Lexis as a Linguistic Level.’’ In In Memory of J. R. Firth, ed. by C. Bazell, J. Catford, M. Halliday, and R. Robins, 148–162. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Higashiizumi, Yuko
2006 From a Subordinate Clause to an Independent Clause: A History of English Because-Clause and Japanese Kara-clause. Tokyo: Hituzi Shobo Publishing.Google Scholar
Hopper, Paul J.
1987 “Emergent Grammar.” Berkeley Linguistics Society 13: 139–157. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1998 “Emergent Grammar.” In The New Psychology of Language: Cognitive and Functional Approaches to Language Structure, ed. by Michael Tomasello, 155–75. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Hopper, Paul J., and Elizabeth C. Traugott
2003 Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hunston, Susan
2004 “Counting the Uncountable: Problems of Identifying Evaluation in a Text and in a Corpus.” In Corpora and Discourse, ed. by Alan Partington, John Morley, and Louann Haarman, 157–188. Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Keisanen, Tiina, and Elise Kärkkäinen
2014 “A Multimodal Analysis of Compliment Sequences in Everyday English Interactions.” Pragmatics, 24 (3): 649–672. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kim, Minju
2018 “From Connective to Final Particle: Korean Tunci ‘or’ and Cross-linguistic Comparisons.” Journal of Pragmatics 135: 24–38. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Koivisto, Aino
2012 “Discourse Patterns for Turn-Final Conjunctions.” Journal of Pragmatics 44 (10): 1254–1272. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lindström, Anna K. B.
1997 Designing Social Actions: Grammar, Prosody, and Interaction in Swedish Conversation. PhD dissertation. University of California, Los Angeles.
Louw, Bill
1993 “Irony in the Text or Insincerity in the Writer?”. In Text and Technology: In Honour of John Sinclair, ed. by M. Baker, G. Francis, and E. Tognini-Bonelli, 157–176. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McEnery, A., and Zhonghua Xiao
2004 “The Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese: A Corpus for Monolingual and Contrastive Language Study.” In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC) 2004 , 1175–1178. Lisbon, May 24-30, 2004.
McGloin, Naomi H., and Yumiko Konishi
2010 “From Connective Particle to Sentence-Final Particle: A Usage-Based Analysis of Shi ‘and’ in Japanese.” Language Sciences 32 (5): 563–578. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Moon, Rosamund
1997 “Vocabulary Connections: Multi-Word Items in English.” In Vocabulary: Description, Acquisition and Pedagogy, ed. by N. Schmitt and M. McCarthy, 40–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Mulder, Jean, and Sandra A. Thompson
2008 “The Grammaticization of But as a Final Particle in English Conversation.” In Crosslinguistic Studies of Clause Combining: The Multifunctionality of Conjunctions, ed. by Ritva Laury, 179–204. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nakayama, Toshihide, and Kumiko Ichihashi-Nakayama
1997 “Japanese Kedo: Discourse Genre and Grammaticization.” In Japanese/Korean Linguistics, ed. by Ho-min Song and John Haig, 6: 607–618. Stanford: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Norde, Muriel
2009 Degrammaticalization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Norrick, Neal R.
2009 “Conjunctions in Final Position in Everyday Talk.” In Language in Life, and a Life in Language: Jacob Mey, A Festschrift, ed. by Bruce Fraser and Ken Turner, 319–328. Bingley: Emerald. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ochs, Elinor, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Sandra A. Thompson
1996 Interaction and Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ohori, Toshio
1995 “Remarks on Suspended Clauses: A Contribution to Japanese Phraseology.” In Essays in Semantics and Pragmatics: In Honor of Charles J. Fillmore, ed. by Masayoshi Shibatani and Sandra A. Thompson, 201–218. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
1997 “Framing Effects in Japanese Non-Final Clauses: Toward an Optimal Grammar-Pragmatics Interface.” Berkeley Linguistics Society 23: 471–480. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Okamoto, Shigeko
1995 “Pragmaticization of Meaning in Some Sentence-Final Particles in Japanese.” In Essays in Semantics and Pragmatics: In Honor of Charles J. Fillmore, ed. by Masayoshi Shibatani and Sandra A. Thompson, 219–246. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Partington, Alan
2004 “ ‘Utterly Content in Each Other’s Company’: Semantic Prosody and Semantic Preference.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 9 (1): 131–156. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pawley, Andrew, and Francis H. Snyder
1983 “Two Puzzles for Linguistic Theory: Nativelike Selection and Nativelike Fluency.” In Language and Communication, ed. by J. Richards and R. Smith, 192–226. New York: Longman.Google Scholar
Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik
1985 A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Raymond, Geoffrey
2004 “Prompting Action: The Stand-Alone ‘So’ in Ordinary Conversation.” Research on Language and Social Interaction. 37 (2): 185–218. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rhee, Seongha
2012 “Context-Induced Reinterpretation and (Inter)subjectification: The Case of Grammaticalization of Sentence-Final Particles.” Language Sciences 34 (3): 284–300. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2016 “On the Emergence of the Stance-Marking Function of English Adverbs: A Case of Intensifiers.” Linguistic Research 33 (3): 395–436. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rossi, Giovanni
2014 “When Do People not Use Language to Make Requests?” In Requesting in Social Interaction, ed. by Paul Drew and Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen, 303–334. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Schmitt, Norbert
2005 “Formulaic Language: Fixed and Varied.” Estudios de Linguistica Inglesa Aplicada (ELIA) 2005–6 (6): 13–39.Google Scholar
Schmitt, Nobert, and Ronald Carter
2004 “Formulaic Sequences in Action: An Introduction.” In Formulaic Sequences: Acquisition, Processing and Use, ed. by Norbert Schmitt, 1–22. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Simpson-Vlach, Rita C., and Sheryl Leicher
2006 The MICASE Handbook: A Resource for Users of the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sinclair, John McH
1991 Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
1996 “The Search for Units of Meaning.” Textus IX (1): 75–106.Google Scholar
Stivers, Tanya, and Jack Sidnell
2005 “Introduction: Multimodal Interaction”. Semiotica 156–1/4: 1–20.Google Scholar
Stokoe, Elizabeth
2010 “ Have You Been Married, or…?: Eliciting and Accounting for Relationship Histories in Speed-Dating Interaction.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 43 (3): 260–282. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Suzuki, Ryoko
1999a “Mutifuncitonality: The Developmental Path of the Quotative Tte in Japanese.” In Cognition and Function in Language, ed. by Barbara A. Fox, Dan Jurafsky, and Laura A. Michaelis, 50–64. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
1999b Grammaticization in Japanese: A Study of Pragmatic Particle-ization. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara.
2007 “(Inter)subjectification in the Quotative Tte in Japanese Conversation: Local Change, Utterance-ness and Verb-ness.” Journal of Historical Pragmatics 8 (2): 207–237. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2011 “A Note on the Emergence of Quotative Constructions in Japanese Conversation.” In Subordination in Conversation: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective, ed. by Ritva Laury and Ryoko Suzuki, 149–164. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tao, Hongyin
2007 “A Corpus-Based Investigation of Absolutely and Related Phenomena in Spoken American English.” Journal of English Linguistics 35 (1): 1–25. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2011 Working with Spoken Chinese.Center for Advanced Language Proficiency Education and Research (CALPER) Publications, Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA.Google Scholar
Tao, Hongyin, and Linda R. Waugh
1998 “The Cornell-Cambridge University Press Corpus of Spoken American English.” Paper presented at Teaching and Language Corpora 1998 , Keble College, Oxford, July 24–27, 1998.
Tao, Hongyin, and Richard Xiao
2007 The UCLA Chinese Corpus. Los Angeles, USA and UCREL, Lancaster, UK.Google Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth C.
1999 “The Role of Pragmatics in Semantic Change.” In Pragmatics in 1998: Selected Papers from the 6th International Pragmatics Conference, Vol. II, ed. by J. Verschueren, 93–102. Antwerp: International Pragmatics Association.Google Scholar
2002 “From Etymology to Historical Pragmatics.” In Studying the History of the English Language: Millennial Perspectives, ed. by D. Minkova and R. Stockwell, 19–49. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2003 “From Subjectification to Intersubjectification.” In Motives for Language Change, ed. by Raymond Hickey, 124–139. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wray, Alison
2002 Formulaic Language and the Lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2008 Formulaic Language: Pushing the Boundaries. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Xiao, Richard, and Tony McEnery
2006 “Collocation, Semantic Prosody, and Near Synonymy: A Cross-Linguistics Perspective.” Applied Linguistics, 27 (1): 103–129. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Xun, Endong, Rao Gaoqi, Xiao Xiaoyue, and Zang Jiaojiao
2016 “The Construction of the BCC Corpus in the Age of Big Data.” Yuliaoku Yuyanxue [Corpus Linguistics] 3 (1): 93–118.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Suzuki, Ryoko
2022. Creativity in compliment responses in Japanese everyday talk. East Asian Pragmatics 7:3 ► pp. 365 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 15 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.