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:

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.