Formulaic Sequences in Functional and Cognitive Linguistics

Abstract

This paper attempts to resolve the tension between an approach to language in which lexical items are matched individually with slots in frames provided by the syntax of a language, and one which holds that much of our language consists of recurrent, reusable multiword chunks, with differing degrees of variability, and often with rather ill-defined boundaries. The properties of three formulaic sequences are briefly described, and then four linguistic approaches are examined to determine to what extent they can account for these properties. It is concluded that all the approaches fail to accommodate semantic prosodies which can extend over ill-defined stretches of language. A model is proposed in which associative patterns at different levels of description are linked by constraint satisfaction mechanism.