This is the first book to address formulaic language directly and provide a foundation of knowledge for graduates and researchers in early stages of study of this important language phenomenon. It is also suitable for students of linguistics, applied linguistics, and language teacher education. The information that currently exists is scattered throughout articles and book chapters across a range of subfields of linguistics and applied linguistics. Over the past few decades there has been a steadily increasing interest and research focus on the phenomenon of formulaic language in the fields of linguistics and applied linguistics. Slowly, a consistent definition has emerged, centring around the idea that formulaic sequences are multi-word units with specific meanings or functions, and some evidence points to their being processed mentally as wholes. Researchers from diverse backgrounds have identified the nature and roles of formulaic sequences in language acquisition and production, in the construction of text and discourse, in spoken and written language, and in language teaching. The increasing volume, diversity, and complexity of the state of knowledge about this emerging area of study is marshalled by this intelligent and well-written book.

The notion of formulaicity has received increasing attention in disciplines and areas as diverse as linguistics, literary studies, art theory and art history. In recent years, linguistic studies of formulaicity have been flourishing and the very notion of formulaicity has been approached from various methodological and theoretical perspectives and with various purposes in mind. The linguistic approach to formulaicity is still in a state of rapid development and the objective of the current volume is to present the current explorations in the field. Papers collected in the volume make numerous suggestions for further development of the field and they are arranged into three complementary parts. The first part, with three chapters, presents new theoretical and methodological insights as well as their practical application in the development of custom-designed software tools for identification and exploration of formulaic language in texts. Two papers in the second part explore formulaic language in the context of language learning. Finally, the third part, with three chapters, showcases descriptive research on formulaic language conducted primarily from the perspectives of corpus linguistics and translation studies. The volume will be of interest to anyone involved in the study of formulaic language either from a theoretical or a practical perspective.

Understanding Formulaic Language: A Second Language Acquisition Perspective brings together leading scholars to provide a state-of-the-art, interdisciplinary account of the acquisition, processing, and use of formulaic language. Contributors present three distinct but complementary perspectives on the study of formulaic language – cognitive/psycholinguistic, socio-cultural/pragmatic, and pedagogical – to highlight new work as well as directions for future work. This book is an essential resource for established researchers and graduate students in second language acquisition and pedagogy, corpus and cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and pragmatics.

Using rigorous data-led methods, the book analyses formulaic language from the angle of historical linguistics, revealing key new insights.

Applies applied linguistic theories to the development of materials for language learning to add new depth to the field.

To apply the same approaches to analysing spoken and written formulaic language is problematic; to do so masks the fact that the contextual meaning of spoken formulaic language is encoded, to a large extent, in its prosody. In The Prosody of Formulaic Sequences, Phoebe Lin offers a new perspective on formulaic language, arguing that while past research often treats formulaic language as a lexical phenomenon, the phonological aspect of it is a more fundamental facet. This book draws its conclusions from three original, empirical studies of spoken formulaic language, assessing intonation unit boundaries as well as features such as tempo and stress placement. Across all studies, Lin considers questions of methodology and conceptual framework. The corpus-based descriptions of prosody outlined in this book not only deepen our understanding of the nature of formulaic language but have important implications for English Language Teaching and automatic speech synthesis.

The Routledge Handbook of Vocabulary Studies provides a cutting-edge survey of current scholarship in this area. Divided into four sections, which cover understanding vocabulary; approaches to teaching and learning vocabulary; measuring knowledge of vocabulary; and key issues in teaching, researching, and measuring vocabulary, this Handbook: • brings together a wide range of approaches to learning words to provide clarity on how best vocabulary might be taught and learned; • provides a comprehensive discussion of the key issues and challenges in vocabulary studies, with research taken from the past 40 years; • includes chapters on both formulaic language as well as single-word items; • features original contributions from a range of internationally renowned scholars as well as academics at the forefront of innovative research. The Routledge Handbook of Vocabulary Studies is an essential text for those interested in teaching, learning, and researching vocabulary.