A number of researchers have focused on formulaic language from a broader discourse or ethnomethodological perspective. This work offers an important new perspective in that it engages more fully than other approaches with the relationship between formulaic language and differing contexts of production. Whereas other frameworks have concentrated largely on the benefits of formulaic language in reducing the processing load of fluent language use, discourse analysts have often twinned this motivation with social goals.
Central to discourse analytic approaches has been the recognition that, though grammar provides us with a theoretically infinite range of utterances, only a small
proportion of these are considered appropriate in context by native speakers. Like Hoey (2005), therefore, they hold that linguists need to account not only for what is possible, but also for what is natural, or probable in a certain situation. Coulmas (1981) spells out the point in his discussion of conversational routines. While the great
creative power of an unfettered combinatorial grammar would predict “that almost every sentence has an occurrence probability of close to zero”, in fact “a great deal of communicative activity consists of enacting routines making use of prefabricated linguistic units in a well-known and generally accepted manner”. Much of our
interaction is repetitive and, “as similar speech situations recur, speakers make use of similar and sometimes identical expressions”. “Conversational routines”, on this view, are “highly conventionalized prepatterned expressions whose occurrence is tied to more or less standardized communication situations” (1981, pp. 1-3). This definition covers a broad range of phenomena – including idioms, collocations, and even the large-scale conventionalised structures which shape the accepted formats of a routine conversation. “Wherever repetition leads to automatization”, Coulmas writes, “we would call a performance a routine” (1981, p. 3). Many conversational routines can be characterised in Gricean terms as conventional implicatures - indirect speech acts whose interpretations do not have to be calculated during the course of conversation, but are known in advance thanks to their frequent use (1981, p. 7). While
conversational routines are partly a form of social cement – “tools which individuals employ in order to relate to others in an accepted way” (1981, p. 2) - Coulmas also stresses their benefits for individual speakers in terms of psycholinguistic processing. Quoting Ladefoged’s remark that the central nervous system “has rapid access to items in a very large memory, but comparatively little ability to process these items when they have been taken out of memory”, he suggests that “routine formulae can be drawn from the memory without much effort, and, at the same time, they give us time for conversational planning” (Coulmas, 1981, pp. 9-10).
Kuiper (2004) also argues that routine performance supports fluency. He reviews Lord and Parry’s studies of illiterate oral bards in the former Yugoslavia, who achieve the difficult task of composing poems in real time while maintaining fluency and adapting to audience reactions. Kuiper comes to the conclusion that these bards rely on
on the resources of the tradition, formulaic performance is only possible in routine contexts. That is, in situations where there is an expectation that things will happen in much the same way as they have happened before” (2004, p. 39). Building on this idea, Kuiper goes on to report his own research into the use of formulaic language in two other high-pressure but routine situations - sports commentary and auctioneering. He again finds a correlation between formulaicity and performance pressures, and also notes the socio-cultural significance of the formulas used – the insider knowledge to utilise the scripts provided by a tradition plays a significant role in “the construction of the social self” (2004, p. 44). As Kuiper puts it: “We play parts, and a good deal of what it means to play a part is learning the lines” (2004, p. 44).
The social significance of formulaic language is underlined by broader sociolinguistic studies. Kuiper cites work by Ji on the use of routine formulas before, during and after China’s Cultural Revolution (Kuiper, 2004, pp. 45-46). It was found that old formulas, bound up with old ways, were “either proscribed or altered to represent the new order”, and that the formulaic inventory mirrored “each twist and turn of ideological and political direction” during the Revolution. Kuiper argues that “linguistic engineering through young people’s desire for conformity in being like their peers came to be exploited for socio-political ends”, and concludes that “formulaic speech is not only sensitive to socio-cultural change but can be manipulated by the powerful for socio- political ends” (2004, p. 46). This idea has also been explored by Stubbs (1996).
Another discourse-based approach to formulaic language is found in the work of Tannen (1989), who looks at what she calls ‘prepatterning’ in conversation. She claims that “all discourse…is more or less prepatterned”. All text consists of prefabrications of various sorts, and, since all meaning is derived through previous associations, semantics itself is “a matter of prior text” (1989, pp. 42-43). Tannen presents a model on which prepatterning varies along three scales of fixity: fixity of
form, fixity of context and fixity of time. Highly fixed in both context and form are situational formulas: expressions which are “always uttered in exactly the same way
and are associated with – indeed expected in – certain situations”, to the extent that their “omission would be noticed and disapproved”. Such formulas are not common in English, but much use is made of them in, for example, Arabic, Turkish, and Greek (1989, pp. 38-39). Equally fixed in form but less so in context are proverbs and
sayings. Again, Tannen notes a suspicion of such fixed phrases by Americans, and points out that speakers of English often produce variations on canonical forms, utilising them as a resource for creativity (a point taken up at greater length by Carter (2004)). Prepatterning is also seen at higher levels of discourse – in terms both of recognisable patterns of discourse organisation and, more abstract still, of culturally- specific notions of “what seems self-evidently appropriately say, indeed, to think, feel, or opine” (1989, p. 44).
Fixity with respect to time refers to the “relative longevity” of prepatterning (1989, pp. 45-46). At one end of the scale is “ephemeral language which is picked up and
repeated verbatim in a given conversation and then forgotten”; at the other are those phrases and texts which remain lodged in the cultural lexicon for centuries (Biblical and Shakespearean quotations being the obvious examples). In between these extremes, we find the private languages developed by individuals and groups and fashionable terms and phrases which regularly pass in and out of a culture.
Like the other discourse analysts discussed here, Tannen notes the importance of such language in easing the cognitive burdens of language production and comprehension and in asserting socio-cultural identities. Taking the latter aspect one step further, she asks why we should be driven towards repetition; why fixity is emotional and
distinctive, rather than boring and bland. Quoting approvingly Freud’s assertion that “[r]epetition, the re-experiencing of something identical, is clearly in itself a source of pleasure”, she speculates that this drive could serve the purpose of underwriting learning (1989, p. 94). The idea that a love of repetition might provide us with an evolutionary survival advantage is discussed in more detail by Cook (2000).