The term formulaic sequences encompasses a various types of word strings which appear to be stored and retrieved as holistic units from the memory. Formulaic sequences constitute a large proportion of any discourse and, furthermore, they exist in so many forms that it is difficult to develop a definition of this phenomenon. This article outlines important aspects of formulaic sequences from a psycholinguistic point of view; it also shows the variety of definitions and classifications which appear in the research literature, and tries to find the criteria which identify formulaic sequences in a discourse or a text.
Der Begriff formelhafter Äußerungen umfasst unterschiedliche Arten von Wortverbindungen, die vom Gedächtnis als Ganzes gespeichert und abgerufen werden. Der Beitrag diskutiert zwei in diesem Zusammenhang zentrale Fragen: Wie können formelhafte Äußerungen definiert und identifiziert werden. Formelhafte Äußerungen sind nämlich so verschiedenartig, dass es schwierig ist, ihre Definition zu formulieren und ihre Merkmale zu beschreiben. Die derzeit existierenden Methoden der Identifizierung (z.B. aufgrund von Häufigkeit) werden kritisiert, denn alle haben ihre Nachteile; die Anwendung der Intuition, die häufig von der Forschung herangezogen wird, ist auch mit vielfältigen Problemen verbunden.
EN
The term “formulaic sequences” encompasses various types of word strings which appear to be stored and retrieved as holistic units from the memory. This article discusses two major problems in the study of formulaic sequences: how to define their features and how to identify these sequences in discourse. The problem is that formulaic sequences exist in so many forms that it is difficult to develop a definition of this phenomenon and to find the main characteristics of formulaic sequences. The existing methods of identifying formulaic sequences (e.g. by frequency in the corpus) can be used to some degree but each of them has its drawbacks. Even drawing on the individual’s intuition as the basis for identifying these sequences runs into its own serious problems.
This study is a cross-sectional analysis of the relationship between productive fluency and the use of formulaic sequences in the speech of highly proficient L2 learners. Two samples of learner speech were randomly drawn and analysed. Formulaic sequences were identified on the basis of two distinct procedures: a frequency-based, distributional approach which returned a set of recurrent sequences (n-grams) and an intuition and criterion-based, linguistic procedure which returned a set of phrasemes. Formulaic material was then removed from the data. Breakdown and speed fluency measures were obtained for the following types of speech: baseline (pre-removal), formulaic, non-formulaic (postremoval). The results show significant differences between baseline and post-removal fluency scores for both learners. Also, formulaic speech is produced more fluently than non-formulaic speech. However, the comparison of the fluency scores of n-grams and phrasemes returned inconsistent results with significant differences reported only for one of the samples.
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