Introduction

Phraseology, the study of fixed expressions, plays a significant role in developing linguistic and intercultural communication competences. Understanding and using fixed expressions such as idioms and collocations is essential to understand the meaning of a sentence or a text and to communicate effectively in a language. It also helps in developing intercultural communication competences as different cultures have different fixed expressions. Teaching and learning phraseology can be done through various techniques such as using authentic materials and games and activities. Therefore, phraseology is a vital component of language learning and teaching and has significant implications for developing effective communication skills.

Language is a vital tool for communication and the transfer of information. It plays a crucial role in the creation and transmission of culture. Understanding the nuances of language and its various components is essential to develop effective communication skills. Phraseology, which is the study of fixed expressions, has significant implications for developing linguistic and intercultural communication competences. This article aims to explore the role of phraseology in developing these competences.

 Understanding Phraseology refers to the study of fixed expressions, also known as multi-word units, which are commonly used in a language. These expressions can be idioms, collocations, proverbs, or any other fixed expressions that are used in a particular language. Phraseology is an essential component of language as it helps in understanding the meaning of a sentence or a text. It also plays a crucial role in the development of communication skills.

Methods

Phraseology and Intercultural Communication Competences Intercultural communication competence refers to the ability to communicate effectively with people from different cultures. Understanding phraseology is essential to develop intercultural communication competences. Different cultures have different fixed expressions, and understanding them is crucial to communicate effectively with people from different cultures. Understanding these idioms is essential to communicate effectively with English speakers. Similarly, different cultures have different proverbs, and understanding them is crucial to communicate effectively with people from different cultures.

Authentic materials such as newspapers, magazines, and films provide exposure to fixed expressions commonly used in the language. Games and activities make learning more engaging and memorable, while teaching fixed expressions through cultural and social contexts helps learners understand the cultural and social meaning of these expressions. Overall, the literature suggests that phraseology, including fixed expressions such as idioms and collocations, plays a significant role in developing linguistic and intercultural communication competences. Teaching and learning phraseology through context and authentic materials, games and activities, and cultural and social contexts is an effective way to develop effective communication skills. Furthermore, a study by Benczes and Kormos (2014) investigated the role of idioms in developing language proficiency. The study found that idioms play a crucial role in developing communicative competence as they convey cultural and social meaning. It also suggested that teaching idioms through their cultural and social contexts is an effective way to develop language proficiency.

Results

Creating a timeline for formulaic language is far from simple, because several partially independent lines of research have contributed to the emerging picture. Each exhibits cycles of innovation and consolidation over time: domains take a leading role in developing new knowledge and then fall back, while another area comes to the fore. Thus, some of the first observations about formulaic language, back in the nineteenth century, were in the clinical domain of aphasia studies. By the early to mid-twentieth century it was theories of language structure that had         most to say, until eclipsed by the Chomskian model, which saw little significance in lexicalised units larger than the word.Meanwhile, changes in language teaching methodology in the mid to late twentieth century increasingly urged teachers to ask how adult learners could best master multiword strings to improve fluency        and idiomaticity – a question still asked today. By the end of the twentieth century, new technological advances revealed frequency in usage as a probable agent of formulaicity, and these chimed with new models of lexical knowledge based on neural pathways and networks that could be strengthened by repeated exposure. Drawing on these models, we have seen, as we move into the twenty-first century, the development of new approaches to modelling language as a system – emergent grammars, including Construction Grammar – that are more accommodating of large, internally complex units. And finally, as we gradually understand more about how the brain accesses and retrieves linguistic material, we are seeing a resurgence of interest in formulaic language in neurological and clinical contexts.

In previous research, the term “formulaic sequence” was often used interchangeably with “formulaic language,” as an umbrella term, which received opposition in recent years, especially in the context of SLA. Defined as formulaic sequence in a specific sense, as a multiword sequence that forms a complete phrase, which should be distinguished from a lexical bundle, which runs across phrasal boundaries. Their definition of formulaic sequences echoes version, which considers formulaic sequences to have “syntactically and semantically well-formed structure,” “with a complete syntactic structure and semantic meaning that can be found in an authoritative dictionary” (p. 165). In addition, research reported the processing advantage of formulaic sequences, but the results showed no processing advantage of lexical bundles. In other words, only formulaic sequences, which do not run across phrasal boundaries, were reported to be processed faster.

The most widely employed definition of formulaic sequence is by, who defined a formulaic sequence as follows:

a sequence, continuous or discontinuous, of words or other elements, which is, or appears to be, prefabricated: that is, stored and retrieved whole from memory at the time of use, rather than being subject to generation or analysis by the language grammar. (p. 9)

However, this definition was later regarded as a stipulative and not operational one and that the holistic storage and representation are controversial and contradicting. Meanwhile, this definition reflects the fuzzy nature of formulaic sequences, since a word sequence processed holistically by one person may not be processed holistically by another, and the matter of holistic processing may be a matter of degree.

In her later work, further defined formulaic sequences as words that have “an especially strong relationship with each other in creating their meaning” (p. 9), and distinguished          between speaker-external and speaker-internal approaches to formulaicity, the former of which focused on the formal properties of strings, frequency of occurrence, or pragmatic functions of formulaic sequences, while the latter of which focused on the holistic retrieving and storage of formulaic sequences. In this sense, two prominent features of formulaic sequences, namely their ability to be holistically stored and retrieved, as well as the connections between the words constituting a formulaic sequence, actually correspond to the speaker-internal and speaker-external perspectives, respectively.

Based on this distinction, emphasized the necessity to re-term these two approaches to formulaic sequences, regarding them as two distinct constructs which are conceptually fundamentally different, indicating an external linguistic phenomenon and an internal cognitive process, respectively. On one hand, they re-termed speaker-external formulaic sequences as linguistic clusters (LC), defined as “multimorphemic clusters which are either semantically or syntactically irregular, or whose frequent co-occurrence gives them a privileged status in a given language as a conventional way of expressing something”. On the other hand, they re-termed speaker-internal formulaic sequences as processing units (PU), defined as “a multiword semantic/functional unit that presents a processing advantage for a given speaker, either because it is stored whole in their lexicon or because it is highly automatized”.

Discussion

‘Formulaicity’ and ‘formulaic sequence' will be used in this paper to describe, in a neutral way, a phenomenon that encompasses various types of word string which appear to be stored and retrieved whole from memory. Our working definition of the formulaic sequence will be: a sequence, continuous or discontinuous, of words or other meaning elements, which is, or appears to be, prefabricated: that is, stored and              retrieved whole from memory at the time of use, rather than being subject to generation or analysis by the language grammar. This includes, at the one extreme, tightly idiomatic and immutable strings, such as by and large, which are both semantically opaque and syntactically irregular, and, at the other, transparent and flexible ones containing slots for open class items, like NP be-TENSE sorry to keep-TENSE you waiting Perkins (in press) formulaicity as follows: “manifested in strings of linguistic items where the relation of each item to the rest is relatively fixed, and where the substitutability of one item by another of the same category is relatively constrained”.

Many have offered descriptions and/or categorizations of formulaic sequences in adult native language, including Becker, 1975, Bolinger, 1976, Hatch, Peck & Wagner-Gough, 1979, Coulmas, 1979, Coulmas, 1994, Yorio, 1980, Lattey, 1986, Van Lancker, 1987, Moon, 1992, Howarth, 1998, Moon, 1998. Although by no means the most detailed, Becker's (1975) basic six category taxonomy of adult native speaker formulas is a useful reference point:

• Polywords, e.g. (the) oldest profession; to blow up; for good.
• Phrasal constraints, e.g. by sheer coincidence.
• Meta-messages, e.g. for that matter... (message: ‘I just thought of a better way of making my point’); ...that's all(message: ‘don't get flustered’).
• Sentence builders(person A) gave (person B) a (long) song and dance about (a topic)¹.
• Situational utterances, e.g. how can I ever repay you?
• Verbatim texts, e.g. better late than never; How ya gonna keep ‘em down on the farm? (adapted from Becker, 1975, p. 6f).

Becker's categorisation, like Nattinger and De Carrico‘s (1992) considerably more detailed one which draws heavily upon it, suffers from difficulties in teasing apart form and function. Furthermore, he does not focus directly on the potential of formulaic sequences to tolerate grammatical and semantic oddity, including the complex relationship they have with metaphor, and he fails to capture the possibility of placing them on a continuum from fixed to novel (see Section 1.6).

In many, but not all, cases, formulaic sequences have relinquished their semantic compositional meaning in favour of a holistic one (Nattinger and DeCarrico, 1992, pp. 32–33), and in this respect they coincide in part with idioms and metaphors (Yorio, 1980, Moon, 1992). It is common for a formulaic sequence to carry a metaphorical meaning, and in some cases it would be impossible for a hearer to understand it for the first time without substantial pragmatic or direct explicational context (e.g. straight from the horse's mouth; to pull someone's leg) (see Gibbs, 1991). In other cases, the metaphorical meaning can be retrieved more directly (e.g. the autumn of one's life; I can read you like a book). Semantically opaque sequences have to be idioms, else they would become unusable, while poetry shows us that transparent metaphors need not be formulaic at all (e.g. young death sits in a cafe smiling—e.e. cummings). This variability in the transparency of sequences makes it superficially attractive to use±idiom as a defining variable in characterising formulaicity. However, Howarth (1998) demonstrates the usefulness of separating out this variable from the main structure of the definition (see below). The scope of formulaic sequences is, however, much wider than idioms, as even the most basic taxonomies, such as Becker's (1975) above, indicate.