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...

The paper discusses the differences between intracultural communication and intercultural communication froma socio-cognitive perspective that treats this relationship as a continuum rather than a dichotomy.Movement on the continuum, anddifferences between the two phenomena are affected by different factors that will be discussed in the paper. The hypothetical left end of the continuum is intra...

A recent model of language processing in normal native speakers (Wray, 2002a) proposes that speakers reap substantial benefits from storing and retrieving prefabricated utterances from memory, rather than always constructing novel ones on line. Substantial evidence from a wide range of linguistic research is consistent with the model, but independent tests of its viability would be difficult to...

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...

A key problem in the description of language structure is to explain its contradictory properties of specificity and generality, the contrasting poles of formulaic prescription and generative productivity. I argue that this is possible if we accept analogy and similarity as the basic mechanisms of structural definition. As a specific example I discuss how it would be possible to use analogy to ...