Introduction

If there is a standard view of what formulaic language is (and the range of descriptions reviewed in this book must cast severe doubt on that), at its heart will be something about word strings which ‘break the rules’. They can break phonological rules, by displaying fewer stresses than expected and by being articulated faster and less clearly. They can break syntactic rules, by resisting pluralization, passivization and so on, and by containing constituents which do not take on their normal grammatical function. They can break lexical rules, by containing items which are archaic or have no independent existence. And they can break semantic rules, by combining to mean something other than they ought to, and by being more idiomatic than an equivalent nonformulaic combination.

Because of the focus on these various kinds of irregularity, formulaic language has customarily been viewed as exceptional, and has been relegated to a minor part of the lexicon. Although individual lines of research have noted its role in processing economy, interaction, language learning, and expression and recovery in aphasia, it has seemed sufficient to place formulaic word strings awkwardly at the edge of lexical models and, often, entirely outside of grammatical ones. In contrast, this book has drawn formulaic language from the edges of an account of linguistic processing to its very centre, by recognizing its many roles and by aligning the irregular minority with a regular majority of formulaic strings which are normally either overlooked entirely or treated with puzzlement.