Sound Evidence: The Missing Piece of the Jigsaw in Formulaic Language Research

With the ever increasing number of studies on formulaic language, we are beginning to learn more about the processing of formulaic language (e.g. Ellis et al. 2008; Siyanova et al. 2011), its use in speech (e.g. Aijmer 1996; Wood 2012) and writing (e.g. Hyland 2008a, 2008b) and its application in natural language processing (e.g. Tschichold 2000). The problem is, however, that we know only very little about the prosody of formulaic language. This article calls for more attention to the prosody of formulaic language in applied linguistics. It is argued that prosody underlies not only the use and the validation of formulaic language, but also its learning and memory. While child first language learners’ learning and memory of formulaic language is prosody-driven, English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) learners cannot benefit from the same mechanism in their learning of formulaic language due to the poverty of spontaneous spoken English input. The lack of opportunity to hear the prosody of formulaic language may partly explain the various difficulties EFL learners have with formulaic language.