Reviewed by Louisa Buckingham, Sabanci University Writing Center, Turkey

This book is the second part of a two-volume collection of papers from the 2007 University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee symposium on formulaic language. Each volume consists of three sections: acquisition and loss, psychological reality, and functional explanations. The first section examines the acquisition of phraseology from a first language (L1) and a second language (L2) perspective (in the latter case, by both beginning and advanced learners) with data collected from written and spoken language. Not limited to English, this section includes chapters on the acquisition of Japanese as a L1 and a L2. The breath of the coverage is surely one of its strengths. Several of the studies suggest that formulaic language is the starting point of L1 acquisition and that, because it is learned in chunks, formulaic language is only analyzed after it is acquired. For L2 learners, acquisition is hindered by difficulties that include learners’ relatively low level of exposure to target expressions and the potential variation of the form of formulaic expressions. Some of the findings confirm that advanced language learners make greater use of formulaic language than low level learners.

Two studies address the psychological reality of formulaic language. The first study challenges the belief that function words intrinsically have a lower saliency than content words. Focusing specifically on verb plus particle combinations, this study concludes that native speakers’ detection of a particle depends on the rate of the frequency of the combination and suggests explanations for the surprisingly higher saliency accorded to particles of moderate frequency. The second study examines the effect of semantic prosody on the processing of collocations by using an affective priming task.

The final section comprises studies of a rhetorical nature on both particular word combinations as well as more discursive phrases. The first paper examines the increased use of the rhetorical functions, such as this paper argues, in scholarly writing in the humanities. It is a topic that invites reflection on the rhetorical functions by other commonly used reporting phrases. Languages other than English are also included in this section, such as a study on Khmer’s use of reduplication compounds and a study on Thai formulaic expressions that specifically help the speaker manage time pressures when formulating ideas.

This book, along with its accompanying first volume, has made a broad range of studies on formulaic language accessible in a very attractive publication that is relevant to both postgraduate students and other scholars. Although some studies confirm or extend findings from previous research, several papers consider the importance of formulaic language from perspectives less commonly encountered in the literature.