4 - Patterns of Formulaicity in Normal Adult Language

Summary

In Chapter 1, we saw that the practical purpose of using formulaic sequences appears to be that they reduce processing effort. As Kuiper (1996) puts it:

Formulae make the business of speaking (and that of hearing) easier. I assume that when a speaker uses a formula he or she needs only to retrieve it from the dictionary instead of building it up from its constituent parts.

(p. 3)

By saving on processing, the speaker is able to focus on other kinds of concomitant activity. These may be, for instance, evaluating the ideas contained in the present conversation (e.g., Wray 1992), or engaging in another, unrelated, activity. Jaffe (1978) illustrates the difficulties of the overload which can occur when trying to pay attention to too many things at once:

While listening to a news broadcast on the radio, I began to tell an interesting story aloud. This ‘split attention’ task yielded an eerie experience. When I tried to speak fluently, the broadcast was reduced to gibberish, like the babble of peripheral conversation at a large cocktail party. It was unquestionably speech but was as meaningless as a poorly understood foreign language. Conversely, if I made a concerted effort to follow the gist of the newscast, my own speech became halting and repetitious and I lost the thread of my story.

(p. 55)

Despite these observations, it will become clear in the course of this chapter that not all formulaic sequences can be satisfactorily explained in terms of their ability to reduce the processing load of the speaker.