Formulaic Language in an Emergentist Framework

Abstract

The human brain is a veritable hodgepodge of ad hoc assemblages of the old, the borrowed, and the new, gerrymandered in response to millennia of internal and external forces. Formulaic language has recently received benefit of scrutiny from a broad range of disciplines. The unique characteristics of formulaic expressions distinguish learning, emotion, motor programs, and memory mechanisms from novel expressions in acquisition, normal pragmatic use, mental representation, and underlying brain function. These characteristics arise from the contribution of multiple cognitive and neurological systems, seen as underlying use of formulaic expressions. The goal of this chapter is to account for formulaic language in terms of these various neurological and psychological systems. Key roles of chunking and memorial processes in child language learning are highlighted in the emergentist framework. Second language learners encounter special challenges in the acquisition and appropriate use of formulaic expressions.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 32 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.