Date: Wednesday 25 June 2025, 12:15 pm to 13:45 pm
Venue: C601, Bismarckstr. 1
About: This event is organized by the RTG Dimensions of Constructional Space.
Title: Must-have, want-to-have, and nice-to-have formulaicity plus formulaic syntax. Suggestions for L2 learning and teaching of multi-word units and related variable constructions based on frequency, idiomaticity and syntagmatic cohesion
About the speaker: Hans-Jörg Schmid is a Professor of English Linguistics at LMU Munich. His research has been devoted to a wide range of fields in linguistics, including linguistic theory, cognitive linguistics, lexical semantics, syntax, word-formation, phraseology, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and language change.
Abstract
Mastery of multi-word units and formulaic language in general holds great potential for improving L2-learners’ fluency. However, the field of formulaic language is internally heterogeneous and externally fuzzy. It remains unclear what types of formulaic language deserve special attention in L2 learning and teaching and whether formulaic sequences are to be demarcated from recurrent lexicogrammatical patterns based on compositional syntax. This issue also arises from the perspective of Construction Grammar, where it would be framed in terms of the tension between schematic and specific constructions as well as the definition of constructions. Factors to be taken into consideration include semantic and pragmatic idiomaticity, internal syntagmatic cohesion (degrees of chunking) and frequency of use. The syntagmatic-strengthening principle, formulated as part of the Entrenchment-and-Conventionalization Model (Schmid 2020), makes predictions concerning the ways in which these factors interact. I test these predictions in an investigation of 14 lexicogrammatical patterns, combining the corpus and the questionnaire method. I discuss the implications of the study for the learning and teaching of formulaic language in L2 and identify four domains of formulaic language: formulaic syntax, must-have formulaicity, want-to-have formulaicity and nice-to-have formulaicity. How much and what kind of attention these domains require in L2 learning and teaching depends on the circumstances under which L2 learning takes place.