Formelhafte Sprache / Formulaic Language – serie

The new book series Formelhafte Sprache / Formulaic Language offers an integrative platform for innovative publications aiming at all forms of formulaicity (German: Vorgeformtheit, Musterhaftigkeit, Formelhaftigkeit) – linguistic, cognitive, conceptual – at all levels of language system and in language use as well as in not purely linguistic areas such as cultural heritage or knowledge creation and storage. Possible research directions are patterns/prefabs in lexicon and grammar, word formation and phraseology, written texts and oral conversations, discourses and text corpora, stereotype building and stigmatization, cognition and cultural memory, verbal and visual knowledge formation and language acquisition. The series covers monographs and conference volumes devoted to theoretical and empirical questions of linguistic, conceptual and cognitive pattern/prefab functioning in modern and historical times. Another central question is the practical role of formulaic patterns/prefabs in language acquisition and teaching. Theoretical and methodological studies from the area of usage-based linguistic frameworks, grammaticalization, lexicalization, Construction Grammars, Corpus / Computer Linguistics, Natural Language Processing and Digital Humanities are welcome. Languages of publication are German and English. All submitted manuscripts are peer-reviewed by the Advisory Board prior to publication. Advisory Board Harald Burger (Zurich, Switzerland)Joan L. Bybee (New Mexico, USA)Dmitrij Dobrovol’skij (Moscow, Russia)Stephan Elspaß (Salzburg, Austria)Christiane Fellbaum (Princeton, USA)Raymond Gibbs (Santa Cruz, USA)Annelies Häcki Buhofer (Basel, Switzerland)Claudine Moulin (Trier, Germany)Jan-Ola Östman (Helsinki, Finland)Stephan Stein (Trier, Germany)Martin Wengeler (Trier, Germany)Alison Wray (Cardiff, UK)

Adopting a corpus-based methodology, this volume analyses phraseological patterns in nine European languages from a monolingual, bilingual and multilingual point of view, following a mostly Construction Grammar approach. At present, corpus-based constructional research represents an interesting and innovative field of phraseology with great relevance to translatology, foreign language didactics and lexicography.

The new book series Formelhafte Sprache / Formulaic Language offers an integrative platform for innovative publications aiming at all forms of formulaicity (German: Vorgeformtheit, Musterhaftigkeit, Formelhaftigkeit) – linguistic, cognitive, conceptual – at all levels of language system and in language use as well as in not purely linguistic areas such as cultural heritage or knowledge creation and storage. Possible research directions are patterns/prefabs in lexicon and grammar, word formation and phraseology, written texts and oral conversations, discourses and text corpora, stereotype building and stigmatization, cognition and cultural memory, verbal and visual knowledge formation and language acquisition. The series covers monographs and conference volumes devoted to theoretical and empirical questions of linguistic, conceptual and cognitive pattern/prefab functioning in modern and historical times. Another central question is the practical role of formulaic patterns/prefabs in language acquisition and teaching. Theoretical and methodological studies from the area of usage-based linguistic frameworks, grammaticalization, lexicalization, Construction Grammars, Corpus / Computer Linguistics, Natural Language Processing and Digital Humanities are welcome. Languages of publication are German and English. All submitted manuscripts are peer-reviewed by the Advisory Board prior to publication. Advisory Board Harald Burger (Zurich, Switzerland)Joan L. Bybee (New Mexico, USA)Dmitrij Dobrovol’skij (Moscow, Russia)Stephan Elspaß (Salzburg, Austria)Christiane Fellbaum (Princeton, USA)Raymond Gibbs (Santa Cruz, USA)Annelies Häcki Buhofer (Basel, Switzerland)Claudine Moulin (Trier, Germany)Jan-Ola Östman (Helsinki, Finland)Stephan Stein (Trier, Germany)Martin Wengeler (Trier, Germany)Alison Wray (Cardiff, UK)

The existence of formulaic patterns has been attested to all languages of the world. However, systematic research in this field has been focused on only a few European standard languages with a rich literary tradition and a high degree of written norm. It was on the basis of these data that the theoretical framework and methodological approaches were developed.The volume shifts this focus by centering the investigation on new data, including data from lesser-used languages and dialects, extra-european languages, linguistic varieties mostly used in spoken domains as well as at previous historical stages of language development. Their inclusion challenges the existing postulates at both a theoretical and methodological level.Areas of interest include the following questions: What is formulaic in these types of languages, varieties and dialects? Are the criteria developed within the framework of phraseological research applicable to new data? Can any specific types of formulaic patterns and/or any specific features of regular (already known) types of formulaic patterns be observed and how do they emerge? What methodological difficulties need to be overcome when dealing with new data?

The new book series Formelhafte Sprache / Formulaic Language offers an integrative platform for innovative publications aiming at all forms of formulaicity (German: Vorgeformtheit, Musterhaftigkeit, Formelhaftigkeit) – linguistic, cognitive, conceptual – at all levels of language system and in language use as well as in not purely linguistic areas such as cultural heritage or knowledge creation and storage. Possible research directions are patterns/prefabs in lexicon and grammar, word formation and phraseology, written texts and oral conversations, discourses and text corpora, stereotype building and stigmatization, cognition and cultural memory, verbal and visual knowledge formation and language acquisition. The series covers monographs and conference volumes devoted to theoretical and empirical questions of linguistic, conceptual and cognitive pattern/prefab functioning in modern and historical times. Another central question is the practical role of formulaic patterns/prefabs in language acquisition and teaching. Theoretical and methodological studies from the area of usage-based linguistic frameworks, grammaticalization, lexicalization, Construction Grammars, Corpus / Computer Linguistics, Natural Language Processing and Digital Humanities are welcome. Languages of publication are German and English. All submitted manuscripts are peer-reviewed by the Advisory Board prior to publication. Advisory Board Harald Burger (Zurich, Switzerland)Joan L. Bybee (New Mexico, USA)Dmitrij Dobrovol’skij (Moscow, Russia)Stephan Elspaß (Salzburg, Austria)Christiane Fellbaum (Princeton, USA)Raymond Gibbs (Santa Cruz, USA)Annelies Häcki Buhofer (Basel, Switzerland)Claudine Moulin (Trier, Germany)Jan-Ola Östman (Helsinki, Finland)Stephan Stein (Trier, Germany)Martin Wengeler (Trier, Germany)Alison Wray (Cardiff, UK)

The existence of formulaic patterns has been attested to all languages of the world. However, systematic research in this field has been focused on only a few European standard languages with a rich literary tradition and a high degree of written norm. It was on the basis of these data that the theoretical framework and methodological approaches were developed.The volume shifts this focus by centering the investigation on new data, including data from lesser-used languages and dialects, extra-european languages, linguistic varieties mostly used in spoken domains as well as at previous historical stages of language development. Their inclusion challenges the existing postulates at both a theoretical and methodological level.Areas of interest include the following questions: What is formulaic in these types of languages, varieties and dialects? Are the criteria developed within the framework of phraseological research applicable to new data? Can any specific types of formulaic patterns and/or any specific features of regular (already known) types of formulaic patterns be observed and how do they emerge? What methodological difficulties need to be overcome when dealing with new data?

Both word-formation (WF) and the coinage of multi-word expressions (MWE) can be characterised in terms of creativity and routine. Routine in word-formation and multi-word expressions is traditionally described in terms of morphological, lexical, syntactic, and pragmatic rules, but ‘creativity’ is defined in different ways, with definitions ranging from seeing creativity at the heart of human (linguistic) cognition to seeing creativity as precisely beyond ‘regular’ routines, e.g. as an attention-seeking tool or wordplay. In this latter sense, ‘creativity’ is usually sharply distinguished from ‘productivity’, i.e. rule-governed behaviour. Despite these categorisations, the question on what basis patterns are to be defined as ‘creative’ still remains subject to debate. Futhermore, creativity and routine are often studied independently of each other, by different research communities. The volume aims to bring together these different research communities to discuss empirical evidence on the role of creativity and routinization in WF and MWEs.

This book investigates comparative constructional idioms of ugliness in Spanish, English and French from a Construction Grammar perspective, combining phraseological theory with a corpus-based methodology. It examines how patterns such as [más feo que X] and [feo como X] in Spanish, [ugly as X] in English or [laid comme X] in French reveal both the productivity and creativity of language, and how they reflect cultural models of ugliness and expressivity across linguistic communities. The analysis identifies cross-linguistic similarities and differences in the formal structure, semantic variation, and pragmatic functions of these idioms, uncovering how meaning and form interact within the grammar–lexicon continuum. By addressing the notion of constructional equivalence and proposing a tertium comparationis for cross-linguistic comparison, the study sheds light on how constructions evolve, extend analogically, and reflect cultural models. The book contributes to research on constructional idioms, usage-based grammar, and corpus linguistics, offering valuable insights for scholars of cognitive and contrastive linguistics, as well as those interested in how linguistic patterns encode culture and creativity.