Background: Formulaic expressions—conversational speech formulas, idioms, pause fillers, conventional phrases, proverbs, expletives, and so on—constitute on average about 25% proportionally of everyday communication. While some clinical and experimental studies have implicated a right hemisphere involvement, controversy remains surrounding cerebral processing with respect to comprehension and p...

Improving oral communication skills is fundamental when it comes to learning English, however; there are lots of factors that make mastering them challenging. English speakers often find managing verbal situations stressful, as they must mind and process many aspects in a restricted time. This paper focuses on the effect teaching multiword strings, known formulaic sequences, an operational tool...

In this paper, we present a methodology for the extraction of formulaic expressions, which goes beyond the mere extraction of candidate patterns. Using a pipeline we are able to extract information about the usage of formulaic expressions automatically from text corpora. According to Biber and Barbieri (2007) formulaic expressions are “important building blocks of discourse in spoken and writte...

PURPOSE The production of formulaic expressions (conversational speech formulas, pause fillers, idioms, and other fixed expressions) is excessive in the left hemisphere and deficient in the right hemisphere and in subcortical stroke. Speakers with Alzheimer's disease (AD), having functional basal ganglia, reveal abnormally high proportions of formulaic language. Persons with Parkinson's disease...

This article revisits earlier proposals that language learning is, in essence, the learning of formulaic sequences and their interpretations; that this occurs at all levels of granularity from large to small; and that the language system emerges from the statistical abstraction of patterns latent within and across form and function in language usage. It considers recent research in individual d...