Chapter One
Introduction

Where foundational stones are put in place, comprising definitions, history, translation challenges, incidence, provenance, and staying power.

You cannot open a book without learning something.
Confucius

As old as Adam

It has been known for a long time that much of communication proceeds with routinized, prefabricated expressions. Robert Louis Stevenson (1882, p. 13) observed that the business of life is not carried on by words, but in set phrases, each with a special and almost a slang signification. This prescient comment refers to the highly specialized knowledge that speakers have, knowledge that includes a constellation of detail around every fixed, familiar phrase. John Ciardi made a similarly astute observation in the forward to his 1987 book (p. 1):

Idiom [i.e., language] is a seemingly sequential illogic (psycho-logic?) to which native speakers of any particular language become conditioned. It is a language convention and encodement, and we become imprinted with it in something like the way a gosling is inner directed to follow the first creature it sees. The gosling asks no questions. It does what seems to be its nature. Like it, we follow our language lead even to the point of absurdity.

The germaneness of this remark - following language conventions to the point of absurdity - pertains to the nature of many fixed, familiar phrases: the meanings are often nonliteral and not predictable from the words themselves; grammatic structure is sometimes distorted; the pronunciation might be idiosyncratic, with specified melody, voice quality, and phonetics; nuances and connotations are strong; and, in many cases, only certain social and linguistic contexts allow for appropriate use. These interesting notions are explored from many perspectives in this book.

It is generally accepted by lay persons and linguists alike that human language contains a large proportion of fully formed expressions, varied in shape and meaning, more or less cohesive, and that these expressions are recognized and known to native speakers (Mackin, 1978; MacKenzie & Kayman, 2018; Schmitt, 2004; Tabossi, Fanari, & Wolf, 2009). Casual observation and introspection, as well as numerous studies, bear witness to the fact that the average language user frequently produces and recognizes many expressions that are "known" or familiar1 (Mitchell, 1971). These recurrent, cohesive expressions in everyday language use are somehow represented in long term memory, as implied by the fact that they are "recognized." The ubiquity of these familiar expressions in all of discourse is examined and celebrated in this book.2 Their hefty and bracing presence throughout verbal and written communication will be amply covered and described. These have been variously called prefabricated, unitary, routinized, fixed, semi-fixed, frozen, cohesive, collocated, and pre-assembled (Wray, 2002). In these pages, the term familiar language will be used as the superordinate category that embraces a large group of language behaviors that, while diverse, share two important characteristics: cohesion and familiarity.

To spare the reader the tedium of lexical repetition as the discussions go forward, other terms for the phenomena are sometimes used interchangeably, and are intended all to designate familiar language: prefabricated expressions, prefabs, fixed expressions, unitary utterances, prepatterned expressions, or known expressions. These terms inclusively designate the very large domain of expressions that are known in the speech community with the property of cohesion; this is useful because studies have been performed on varied renditions, subsets, or groupings within this domain. In this current treatment, the popular cover terms, formulaic language and formulaic expression, are reserved for one class of familiar expressions: the most targeted and celebrated within the realm of familiar language, with its colorful members, idioms, expletives, and conversational speech formulas. It is a goal of this book to clarify and establish classes and subsets based on linguistic, psychological, and neurological benchmarks.

There are many possible and viable classification systems for fixed expressions. A classification system and criteria for labeling of subsets are presented in these pages. In this treatment, exemplars of familiar language in the current treatment fall into one of three classes, based on their distinctive characteristics. The complex features within classes and subsets will be described and illustrated. As will be amply demonstrated, for a given individual utterance token, there is copious evidence that speakers have knowledge of complex, layered nuances and connotations inherent in fixed expressions.

Exposure to the intrinsic features of familiar language provides comfort and humor, as will be amply demonstrated in the pages to come, referencing material from a large range of sources. All fixed, familiar expressions offer potential for creativity, in the eternal dance between theme and variation. These expressions offer benefits to the speaker, buying time, organizing the discourse, and arranging packets of information, and to the listener, by giving a rest in processing effort and allowing a better grasp of the speaker's world (Wray, 2002).

Definitions of "Familiar Language"

Back to square one

The rubrics fixed, familiar phrase and fixed, familiar expression are employed here to refer to expressions that have unitary structure and are known to a speech community. Alternate terms are prefabricated (sometimes abbreviated to prefab) and fixed expressions, to be used interchangeably with familiar expression and familiar phrase.3 Multiword expressions, another useful and current term, is used less here, because many single-word expressions fall into our purview: Hello, shoot!, well, sorry, heck, bullocks, right, righto, pardon, to mention a few.

Given the heterogeneity of these expressions, the most inclusive and the best operational definition for formulaic expressions is an exclusionary one: exemplars of familiar language have in common that they are not newly created, in the moment, from the operation of grammatical rules on lexical items. It follows that they are known - stored in memory (Bybee, 2006). They are familiar in this special sense. They are stored in the mind in a cohesive form. Familiar expressions are known in stereotyped, unitary form, with conventional meaning, and pragmatic contingencies - the social circumstances appropriate to their use - by members of a language community. Cohesive form usually includes certain words in a certain order (while allowing for flexibility of form), often with a prosodic and phonetic signature. With respect to the three classes proposed here, most familiar expressions can be comfortably classified by family resemblance, while many fit well into more than one class as will be demonstrated below. Important in this treatment is consideration of the properties inhering in the different types of expressions.

A familiar expression is generally defined here as a word or multiword sequence that is known to the speaker-hearers of a language as having a special status in the language community (Alexander, 1978; Altenberg, 1998; Bobrow & Bell, 1973). The expression is known to be recognizable not only to oneself but also to other speakers of the language (Kecskés, 2000). These expressions have unique characteristics and specialized functions in verbal and written discourse. Detailed descriptions of the use of fixed expressions in written and spoken discourse reveal that all and any of these characteristics can be transmuted in various ways to achieve a particular communicative purpose, providing that Kuiper's "Law4" is upheld: the known, canonical form is retrievable (Kuiper, 2009). Flexibility of form varies with classes and subsets of familiar exemplars (Fellbaum, 2015). In many items, words can be inserted, morphemes (minimal units of meaning, such as suffixes) and syntactic operations may adjust the original grammatical structure.

This considerable scholarship has revealed new realms of known, familiar expressions and it has led to awareness of their fundamental differences. It is evident, for example, that the expression Shut your mouth! differs in several identifiable linguistic features from All things being equal. Similarly, I also had an ax to grind is not to be comfortably classified with bride and groom. Yet all these expressions are familiar and they are cohesive in form. Adjusting to developments in the past few decades, the current treatment proposes three classes of fixed, familiar expressions: formulaic expressions (e.g., Shut your mouth!), lexical bundles (e.g., All things being equal), and collocations (e.g., bride and groom).

The term formulaicity has been used to refer to the tendency for words to appear together into recognizable phrases; these groupings have been tied to frequency counts in corpora. A major contributory role of text frequency, as nearly fully accountable for familiar expressions, has been put forward (Arnon & Snider, 2010; Siyanova-Chanturia, Conklin, & van Heuven, 2011; Kapatsinski & Radicke, 2009). Noteworthy questions arise here. Does high frequency correspond to and account for all kinds of prefabs in natural language? Can utterances be highly frequent but not a member of a familiar language class? And,...