Murat Şahin – 310465

Phraseology
The periphery and the heart of language

The concept of the inseparability of lexis and linguistic context, or the idea that the
meaning of a word is determined by the words that surround it and the context in which it is
used, has been a central focus in the field of linguistics. Pioneers in this area include Firth,
Fries, and Harris, all of whom recognized the importance of the relationships between words
in determining their meanings. Firth's famous quote, "You shall know a word by the company
it keeps," highlights the idea that the meaning of a word cannot be understood in isolation, but
rather must be considered in the context of the other words with which it appears.
Fries, the founder of the English Language Institute at the University of Michigan,
further developed this concept by distinguishing between lexical and structural meaning. He
argued that language acquisition involves learning a set of patterns, or arrangements of words
with associated structural meanings, and developed a system for teaching English as patterns
to English as a foreign language (EFL) students using audiolingual drills.
Harris, the founder of the first linguistics department in the United States at the
University of Pennsylvania, also emphasized the interdependence of form and meaning in
language. He developed a mathematical theory called Operator Grammar, which proposes that
the syntactic and semantic properties of a word are established purely in relation to other
words and that language patterns are learned through social participation and exposure to
usage. Harris's work represents the culmination of a lifelong effort to understand the
relationship between form and information in language.
In the field of linguistics, the concept of structural patterns, also known as constructions
or phraseologisms, refers to the relationships between the form and meaning of words.
Constructions, as defined in Cognitive Linguistics, are form-meaning mappings that are
conventionalized within a speech community and become entrenched in the learner's mind as
language knowledge. They are the symbolic units of language that link the defining properties
of their morphological, syntactic, and lexical form with particular semantic, pragmatic, and
discourse functions. Phraseologisms, a term used in Corpus Linguistics, refer to the co-
occurrence of a lexical item with one or more additional linguistic elements that function as a
single semantic unit in a clause or sentence and have a higher frequency of co-occurrence than
would be expected by chance.
The verb "lead" serves as an example of how structural patterns become ingrained in
language through usage. Out of context, the most common meaning of "lead" is to cause an
animal to go forward by holding it with a hand or halter. However, in academic prose, where
"lead" is used roughly three times more often, 99% of the full noun subjects are inanimate and
abstract, and the verb typically has a causative or facilitative sense. Its common pattern is
[cause leads to effects]. In this context, "lead" operates in a similar way to the verb "cause,"
but it is not used with human subjects and does not appear in the passive. Semantically, "lead"
is less direct than "cause," implying a series of steps between cause and effect. In terms of its
semantic prosody, "cause" has a negative association and tends to co-occur with negative
expressions, while "lead" has a more balanced distribution of positive and negative objects.
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High type frequency, or the ratio of negative to positive objects, leads to generalization,
while high token frequency leads to increasing entrenchment and idiomaticity. Structural
patterns can be observed at all levels of language, from semi-productive patterns like "lead
[someone] up/down the garden path" to idiomatic expressions like "lead the life of Riley" or
"you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink." These patterns demonstrate
how repeated pairings of particular forms become associated with specific meanings and
functions through usage.
Structuralism, the dominant approach in linguistics in the early 20th century, was
replaced in the 1960s by Generative approaches, which prioritized the top-down, rule-
governed principles of Universal Grammar over the bottom-up, emergent patterns and
constructions that had been the focus of Structuralism. In this view, patterns, structures, and
constructions were considered peripheral and not central to grammar. However, in the 1980s
and 1990s, there was a resurgence of interest in phraseology and constructions, with an
increase in the number of publications on the topic.
Leading figures in this shift back towards a central focus on constructions include
Fillmore, Goldberg, and Croft. Fillmore argued that constructions were central to the
grammar, while Goldberg's Construction Grammar posits that all grammatical phenomena can
be understood as learned pairings of form and their associated functions. Croft's Radical
Construction Grammar, coming from a typological perspective, rejected the idea of universal
syntactic categories and relations, instead proposing that what is universal is the way that
meanings map onto form.
Corpus Linguistic analyses of large collections of text have shown that natural language
makes extensive use of recurrent patterns of words and constructions, and that lexical context
is crucial to understanding word meaning and grammatical role. It has been estimated that
around half of fluent native text is constructed according to the "idiom principle," and
comparisons of written and spoken corpora suggest that phraseological units are even more
frequent in spoken language.
There are several theories that have sought to explain the role and function of
constructions in language, including the Lexical Constructional Model, the Constructional
Approach, and Frame Semantics. These approaches highlight the importance of considering
both form and meaning in the analysis of language and provide a framework for
understanding the relationships between words and their contexts.
Phraseology, the study of fixed expressions and formulaic language, is a central aspect
of language and communication. It has long been recognized as an important aspect of
language acquisition and instruction, with early theories of Fries and colleagues concerning
phrases and structural patterns dating back over 50 years. These theories have been revisited
and refined over the years, and have been referred to under various guises such as
holophrases, prefabricated routines and patterns, formulaic speech, and lexical phrases,
among others. In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in second language
phraseology, with a focus on applied linguistics and cognitive linguistics.
In the realm of language testing, the importance of phraseology is recognized in the
novice stages of adult language acquisition, where learners rely heavily on learned phrases
and recombinations of these. In special purposes tests, such as those for aviation language
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proficiency, phraseology plays a central role in establishing minimum proficiency levels for
native and non-native speakers. Similarly, every genre of English for academic or special
purposes has its own unique phraseology, and learning to be effective in these genres involves
learning these specific phrases.
In language instruction, there is a focus on the "lexical phrase" as the applicable unit of
pre-fabricated language. This emphasis on fixed expressions and patterns is also evident in the
Lexical Approach, which focuses on relatively fixed expressions that frequently occur in
spoken language. The use of corpora has also become increasingly important in language
teaching, as they provide valuable insights into language usage and can serve as a basis for
developing learner dictionaries and materials.
Despite the centrality of phraseology in language and communication, there are still
many gaps in our understanding. Advanced learners of a second language often struggle with
native-like collocation and idiomaticity, and many grammatically correct sentences generated
by language learners can sound unnatural and foreign. Future research in the field of
phraseology will aim to better understand these gaps in knowledge and to provide more
comprehensive insights into the role of phraseology in language acquisition and use.
Phraseology, or the study of fixed expressions and formulaic language, plays a central
role in language use, acquisition, and instruction. It has been studied in second language
acquisition (SLA) under various names, including holophrases, prefabricated routines,
formulaic speech, lexical phrases, formulas, chunks, and constructions. There is currently a
great deal of interest in the field of second language phraseology, as demonstrated by recent
research in applied linguistics and cognitive linguistics. In language testing, the use of learned
phrases is emphasized in the novice stages of adult language acquisition, and phraseology is
also a key focus in specialized language tests, such as those used in the aviation industry. In
language instruction, the lexical phrase has been proposed as a useful unit for teaching, and
the Lexical Approach focuses on teaching fixed expressions that occur frequently in spoken
language.
However, there are also gaps in our understanding of phraseology in SLA. While
formulas are important in child and novice adult language development, advanced learners
often struggle with native-like collocation and idiomaticity. This suggests that the formulaic
knowledge of novices is different from that of fluent speakers, and is acquired in a different
way. Research on phraseology in SLA has implications for the relationship between explicit
and implicit knowledge, language transfer, and the ways in which schematic constructions are
abstracted and learned. The 2005 conference on phraseology in Louvain brought together
researchers from various disciplines to discuss these and other issues in the field.