A few words about formulaic language
Posted on December 27, 2007
For the final paper in my linguistics class this semester, I wrote about formulaic language. Even though the semester is over, I’ve still been thinking about it quite a bit. There are many definitions for the term “formulaic language”, but a general definition is something like: a group of words, a word, or part of a word, that is interpreted by a person as a whole unit, and not broken down further. Usually it is phrases that are commonly used, like “par for the course,” “break a leg,” and “have a nice day.”
From what I understand from my readings, it’s a bit antithetical to what Chomsky talks about, though I haven’t read Chomsky, so I’m not sure if it’s true or not. In a nutshell, Chomsky-ites propose that based people can come up with an infinite number of original phrases, sentences, etc based on grammar, and presumably their vocabulary. That’s probably a simplification, but I think that’s the gist of it. The people who subscribe to the idea of formulaic language believe, even if they can make an infinite combination of unique phrases that make grammatic sense, they most commonly use a relative hand few over and over again.
Here’s a simpler way to look at it: We use 26 letters in the English language. By various letter combinations we get words. Some words are only one letter long, others might be dozens of letters long. The Oxford English Dictionary has a little over 300,000 main entries, though it is unlikely many people know every entry in it, even the editors. Estimates vary widely, but it has been estimated the average college grad has a vocabulary of around 60,000 words. However, even though they have a rich vocabulary, it’s unlikely they use “gaggle” or “hippocampus” very often. Most people are only likely to use a few thousand words on a common basis, so it is thought. So, from 26 letters we get at least 300,000 words, of which we might know around 60,000 and use only a few thousand on a regular basis.
Formulaic language can be looked at in a similar way, but it’s difficult to come up with numbers because it’s a nascent area for research. From various word combinations, we get phrases and sentences. Chomsky’s idea, so I infer, is kind of like the OED of phrases and sentences. The people researching formulaic language propose we used a much more limited set on a regular basis.
The idea of formulaic language dates back decades. Lev Vygotsky, a developmental psychologist in the Soviet Union, described something similar in the 1930′s. For the past few decades, Chomsky’s ideas have been prevalent, and linguistic research has gone along those lines. However, computers have helped us learn a lot more about language because they can be used to look for patterns in the data. A corpus, Latin for body, is a set of data. In linguistics it’s usually a body of text from a certain source, such as magazines, transcripts, etc. Some organizations collect them and make them available for researchers. Google even donated their corpus a few years ago. With corpora to access, corpus linguists can find which words frequently occur next to each other. Though I haven’t played around with actual corpora much, I have been thinking about how word combinations are used.
The idea behind formulaic language is that people hear certain word groupings and they know exactly what is meant. They’ve condensed it to a concept, so the brain doesn’t need to spend time analyzing it. The funny thing is it doesn’t need to be true. Using an example from above, the (former) Soviet Union. For a lot of people, the Soviet Union was equivalent to Russia, even though Russia was only part of the Soviet Union. USSR = Union of Soviet Socialist Republics = Soviet Union != Russia (!= means does not equal) While all Russians were Soviets, not all Soviets were Russians. Similarly, UK = United Kingdom = United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland != England != Britain. While all English are British, not all British are English. They might also be Scottish or Welsh. I haven’t figured out how the Northern Irish fit in there, since they are technically British. They are all Royal subjects, if I understand correctly.
I’m kind of rambling, so I’ll keep on going ;-)
I think a lot of formulaic language carries certain cultural allusions. Since the class was Second Language Acquisition, this was kind why I was interested. While we can teach certain phrases in language classes, it’s impossible to teach them all. Even within a culture, a formulaic phrase might not be understood by everybody. Take the word frog. Most people hear frog and they think of the amphibious creature that likes to croak. It some areas, a frog is an ornamental fastening on a garment, or it is part of a horse’s anatomy. Still, for most people, a frog is an animal that spends time in ponds. Take the following phrase:
________________ frog.
I think most people would put a verb or an adjective on the blank line. However, only certain verbs or adjectives will make sense. Jumping frog, a frog, one frog, green frog, swimming frog, and small frog all seem appropriate. Now if someone wrote singing, dancing frog that wouldn’t make sense unless you saw the old Warner Brothers cartoon, or maybe the Muppet Show. That’s a cultural allusion. Crunchy frog is another cultural allusion, this one based on a Monty Python skit.
“We use only the finest baby frogs, dew-picked and flown from Iraq, cleansed in finest-quality spring water, lightly killed, and then sealed in a succulent Swiss quintuple smooth treble cream milk chocolate envelope and lovingly frosted with glucose.”
I’m done for now. Time to read.
Related posts:
- Summer in the city
- Artificiality
- Review Haiku – Frog Song
- “Web technology is social.”
- Usage of the word “fuck”
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