Formulaic Language and the Lexicon (review)

Phrasal lexical items (PLIs) have been among the orphans of Anglo-American linguistics. Relatively few English-speaking linguists have paid them concerted attention. Unlike morphology, which is a well-established field, the study of PLIs is not. Wray notes that the reasons for the nonemergence of a field for the study of PLIs are many, but a major one is that ‘research on formulaic language has lacked a clear and unified direction, and has been diverse in its methods and assumptions’ (4). (Some of the historical reasons for this are explored in Pawley 2005.) But this situation is changing. Ray Jackendoff’s proposals for placing the phrasal lexicon closer to the center of linguistic theory (Jackendoff 1997, 2002) and W’s survey of the domain of phraseology, as it is called in the German-speaking world (Burger 2003, Palm 1995), are both significant steps.

As the first survey in English, W’s is essential reading for anyone interested in the domain. She approaches PLIs from the perspective of the subfields of linguistics from which PLIs have been examined. The subfields are: descriptive linguistics (Part 1), formulaic language in native speaking adults (Part 2), first language acquisition (Part 3), second language acquisition (Part 4), and language loss in conditions such as aphasia (Part 5). In Part 6, W presents a model of the lexicon in which she places PLIs alongside other lexemes in a ‘heteromorphic distributed model’. About three quarters of the book is devoted to findings about formulaic language which arise from psycholinguistic questions of speech production and perception, language acquisition, and neurolinguistics. This emphasis places the native speaker, as speaker, squarely in focus.

There are other areas of phraseology such as lexicography (Cowie 1998), phraseological diachrony, stylistics (Gläser 1995, Naciscione 2001), and text analysis (Sabban 2005) which are not central to W’s account but have significant coverage in the literature. The whole field of phraseology is to be covered in Burger et al. 2005.

In Ch. 1, W documents the place of PLIs in the history of twentieth-century linguistics. Their existence has certainly been noted, as have many of their properties, but the study of PLIs has been overshadowed by the more central preoccupations of linguistics with grammar and grammars. Yet PLIs are common in linguistic performance. One has only to listen to or read many routine forms of discourse to realize that such genres are cliché-ridden. Newspapers, weather forecasts, sermons, and presidential speeches do not demonstrate high degrees of originality and, while each sentence in a text may be unique, much of the sentence is likely to consist of PLIs augmented by the filling of, for example, tense and subject positions with a lexicalized VP. The frequency with which this occurs suggests that human beings utilize phrasal lexica that contain a large number of PLIs. Igor Mel’čuk (1995) suggests that the phrasal lexicon is an order of magnitude larger than the one-word lexicon. This seems an entirely plausible estimate. Thus speakers have two sets of resources for constructing sentences: analytic ones in which they make the whole up from the smallest parts in the lexicon and more holistic ones where longer phrasal chunks are used as the parts of what is said. This is the position W, like Jackendoff (2002), advocates.

Ch. 2 usefully notes many of the diagnostic properties of PLIs, and in Ch. 3 W discusses taxonomies that have been constructed to account for PLIs and their properties. W distinguishes between two kinds of taxonomy: a theoretically-driven taxonomy ‘which needs to justify itself with reference to an external model of what language is and how it works’ and ‘[p]ractically-driven taxonomies’ which ‘do not need to be theoretically grounded or theoretically robust. They do, however, have to work for their intended purpose’ (45). It should be clear that the latter kind of taxonomy may create problems in practice if it does not relate to, or is in clear conflict with, what is known...