Formulaic Language

What “kick the bucket,” “in the first place,” and “come on in” have in common is that they represent different kinds of formulaic language. Formulaic language is non-propositional speech, including colloquialisms, idioms, schemas, collocations, proverbs, frozen or automatic speech, and phrasal verbs. In corpus linguistics and second-language/learner studies, it is more often examined as lexical bundles or n-grams, contiguous sequences of n-items, which are not as tied to meanings though they may point to such meanings, and are discussed below. The most frequently cited definition of formulaic language is

The meaning of a formulaic expression cannot be guessed from the meanings of the individual words. It has fixed, stereotyped form, often pragmatic in force, dependent on social context including both register and discourse style. Because they are easily recognized and highly numerous, formulaic expressions are highly important for carrying on conversation. In terms of their number, there seems to be no upper limit on their number or on amount in any particular genre of interaction, although their use is claimed to make up at least 25% of any typical conversation. Estimates for what native speakers know range anywhere between 25,000 and 30,000. Formulaic language is often complex in its meanings, frequently nonliteral, requiring contextualized inferencing, and it is related both to stances signaling attitude and to emotional perspectives. Indeed, it has been suggested that a key function is to convey shades of meaning more indirectly and tactfully than literal usage. Initially affiliated with work in poetics, stylistics, and lexicography, and recently brought into prominence through discourse and corpus studies, formulaic language is currently a focus for study in multiple fields, including phraseology, corpus linguistics, psycholinguistics, neuroscience, medicine, second-language learning, child language acquisition, pragmatics, discourse, clinical linguistics, and communication disorders.