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Highlights
- A broad overview of the many kinds of unitary expressions found in everyday verbal and written communication, including their signature meaning, form, and usage, authored by a renowned scholar in the field Foundations of Familiar Language is renowned scholar Diana Sidtis's new contribution to the study of formulaic language through a wide-ranging overview of a large group of language behaviors that share characteristics of cohesion and familiarity, featuring a rational classification of fixed, familiar expressions into formulaic expressions, lexical bundles, and collocations.
- About the Author: Diana Sidtis (formerly Van Lancker), PhD, CCC/SLP, is Professor Emerita of Communicative Sciences and Disorders at New York University and Research Scientist at the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research in Orangeburg, New York.
- 464 Pages
- Language + Art + Disciplines, Language Arts
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About the Book
"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: 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 (p. 1) 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"--Book Synopsis
A broad overview of the many kinds of unitary expressions found in everyday verbal and written communication, including their signature meaning, form, and usage, authored by a renowned scholar in the field
Foundations of Familiar Language is renowned scholar Diana Sidtis's new contribution to the study of formulaic language through a wide-ranging overview of a large group of language behaviors that share characteristics of cohesion and familiarity, featuring a rational classification of fixed, familiar expressions into formulaic expressions, lexical bundles, and collocations. This unique volume offers a new approach to linguistic classification and construction grammar through a dual-process model of language competence rooted in linguistic, psycholinguistic, and neurolinguistic observations, combining insights drawn from foundational studies of psychology and neurology with contemporary theories of the differences between formulaic and propositional language. This approach offers a distinct and innovative contribution to scholarship in the field. The text contains resources for further study and research such as examples, research protocols, and lists of fixed, familiar expressions from the past and present. This authoritative volume:
- Describes the current state of knowledge and reviews experimental results, proposals, and models in a clear and straightforward manner
- Offers up-to-date surveys of the role of fixed expressions in education, social sciences, cognitive psychology, and brain science
- Features a wealth of engaging and relatable examples of formulaic expressions (conversational speech formulas, expletives, idioms, and proverbs), lexical bundles, and collocations
- Includes discussion of the use of fixed, familiar expressions in second language learning
- Presents new research data on the neurological foundations of familiar language drawn from clinical observations and experimental studies of stroke, dementia, and Parkinson's disease
- Contains material from social media, magazines, newspapers, speeches, and other sources to illustrate the importance, abundance, and value of familiar language
Sufficiently in-depth for specialists, while accessible to students and non-specialists, Foundations of Familiar Language is an essential resource for a wide range of readers, including linguists, child language specialists, psychologists, social scientists, neuroscientists, philosophers, educators, teachers of English as a second language, and those working in artificial intelligence and speech synthesis.
From the Back Cover
Foundations of Familiar Language is renowned scholar Diana Sidtis's new contribution to the study of familiar language through a wide-ranging overview of a large group of language behaviors that share characteristics of cohesion and familiarity, including a rational classification system of familiar language into formulaic expressions, lexical bundles, and collocations. This unique volume offers a new approach to linguistic classification and construction grammar through a dual-process model of language competence rooted in linguistic, psycholinguistic, and neurolinguistic observations.
Combining insights drawn from foundational studies of psychology and neurology with contemporary theories of the differences between formulaic and propositional language, this valuable text provides a distinct and innovative contribution to scholarship in the field. It offers up-to-date surveys of the role of fixed expressions in education, social sciences, cognitive psychology, and brain science, presenting new research data on the neurological foundations of familiar language drawn from clinical observations and experimental studies in stroke, dementia, and Parkinson's disease.
The text also contains resources for further study and research such as examples, research protocols, and lists of fixed, familiar expressions from the past and present. A wealth of engaging and relatable examples of conversational formulas, expletives, idioms, proverbs, jargon, and other conventionalized expressions drawn from social media, magazines, newspapers, speeches, and other sources make the text relatable and useful for students as well as researchers. Sufficiently in-depth for specialists, while accessible to students and non-specialists, Foundations of Familiar Language is an essential resource for a wide range of readers, including linguists, child language specialists, psychologists, social scientists, neuroscientists, philosophers, educators, teachers of English as a second language, as well as those working in parallel and overlapping fields such as researchers in artificial intelligence and speech synthesis or professionals in advertising, marketing, journalism, and media.
About the Author
Diana Sidtis (formerly Van Lancker), PhD, CCC/SLP, is Professor Emerita of Communicative Sciences and Disorders at New York University and Research Scientist at the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research in Orangeburg, New York. She is the co-author of Foundations of Voice Studies, which won the 2011 Prose Award for Scholarly Excellence in Linguistics from the American Publishers Association. Her research examining voice, aphasia, motor speech, prosody, and formulaic language has been published in more than 130 peer-reviewed journals and other publications.