Formulaic Language in an Emergentist Framework

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. It follows that human cognition has unfolded, over evolutionary time, out of disparate fragments: emotion, movement programs, very old instincts, multiple memory systems, visual patterning and many uses of sound, all in constant, intimate interplay with harsh contingencies of the environment. Experience with natural language, especially following brain damage, suggests that language may also be viewed as a conglomerate of many disparate structural types. This viewpoint is supported by observing persons with aphasia. In moderate to severe language deficit, certain definable “subsets” of language are preserved, sometimes with dramatically normal skill, while others are impaired (Hughlings Jackson, 1874b; Lum and Ellis, 1994; Van Lancker, 1975, 1988). Observations in the speech and language clinic inspire the whimsical notion that a Rube Goldberg machine model might lend itself to more veridical descriptions of human language than other approaches. Multiple examples of anomalous structural formations fall into the category of formulaic language (Van Lancker, 1973; Van Lancker Sidtis, 2006, 2008a): conversational speech formulas, idioms, expletives, schemas, proverbs, lexical bundles, collocations, and other kinds of fixed conventional expressions comprise a major component of speaker–listener performance (Fillmore, 1979; Pawley and Syder, 1983; Van Lancker Sidtis, 2004). The size of the repertory is difficult to capture: numerical estimates range from more than 25,000 (in the Wheel of Fortune computation; Jackendoff, 1997) to as many as 300,000 (K. Kuiper, personal communication, 2013). Discourse analyses reveal that formulaic expressions – known, holistic material – make up about 25% of ordinary discourse, ranging from 15% to 50% depending on topic and speaker (Van Lancker Sidtis and Rallon, 2004). Casual inquiries as well as formal surveys indicate that speakers endorse familiarity and knowledge of a preponderance of utterances presented to them (Van Lancker Sidtis and Rallon, 2004; Van Lancker Sidtis, Kougentakis, Cameron, Falconer, and J. Sidtis, 2012; Van Lancker Sidtis, Cameron, and Sidtis, 2013).