TAMULIS BOOKS
THE BARDS OF LANGUAGE
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The Bards of Language -Reflections on Formulaic Sequences-
an essay by
Alex Tamulis
The Bards of Language Reflections on Formulaic Sequences Copyright Š 2016 by Alex Tamulis All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval without permission in writing from the author.
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“Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know,
a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations.” — Edward Sapir
Introduction Spoken language heavily relies on formulaic strings of words and sentences: idioms, fixed expressions, lexical items and pre-fabricated chunks are some of the terms used to describe formulaic language in general. This doesn’t mean that those sequences are not ubiquitous in written language, though. However, the fact that spoken language has to be improvised in real-time most of the time adds a potential burden to cognitive processing time. In order to avoid this, the brain retrieves patterns of word strings or even whole sentence strings from memory, like an actor does when speaking his lines in a play. Several linguistic theories and methodologies are cited throughout this study, in order to better understand the interaction between syntax, lexis and pragmatics. Speakers are compared to “epic singers” of Homeric poems; they have to memorize their lines and follow certain rules, but there’s room for originality and even collective composition. Pre-fabricated sentences are seen as verses of ancient epic poems, institutionalized by cultural tradition. “The bards sing the lines”, which can be translated to “speakers use sentences that are socially conventionalized”. They work like “songs”, “hymns”, and “poems”. •v•
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These speakers are to become the new “bards� of language. Just like Homeric singers, they picture language as structures leaning on certain frames: a pragmatic frame, supported by a syntactic apparatus that serves as a foundation structure to formulaic and institutionalized lexis, leaving certain slots for creativity or alternative lexical fillings. The study of the promotion of the self and how it affects the collective underpinnings of a speech community is also explored throughout this essay, with citations from previous works also highlighted when necessary. The quest for formulaic sequences becomes a quest for social and cultural linguistic relevance.
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CONTENTS
-1-The Definition. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 -2-Oral Formulaic Composition. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 -3-The Use of FL in ELT. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 -4-FL Is Not a Markov-Chain Generator . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 -5-The Bards of Language. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 -6-Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 -7-References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 -8-About the Author. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
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1 Wray (2002:9) defines 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. This definition is expanded and “refracted” in this essay; a formulaic sentence, which can be contained of either a noun phrase or a verb phrase, or both combined, is a sequence, continuous or discontinuous, which is, or appears to be, prefabricated: that is, stored and retrieved whole from memory or with minimal processing effort, still regarded as fluent in oral conversation, rather than being subject to generation or analysis by the language grammar. Let us say a speech community speaker is not pleased with his current car and he/she would like to purchase a new one. When he or she says “I want to buy a new car”, that sentence has already been uttered millions of times in world´s history;
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they have heard that sentence being uttered before, they have seen it in newspapers, ads, TV shows, movies, songs, etc. That sentence is fully memorized in their mental lexicon. They can automatically associate the idea of a used car to that sentence; thus, the sentence is stored and retrieved from memory, just like a word or chunk would. A list of other examples can be easily created, showing other sentences that are retrieved from memory with no effort or with minimal cognitive processing, such as: I´m hungry/Good morning/Nice to meet you./How much?/Hi, how are you guys doing today?/Do you need any help?/I´m just looking./Whatever the case may be./ Finders keepers./Really?/That was awesome./How do you like it so far?/So much for ________. /Let´s talk about _____________. The sentences above seem to be mostly processed as wholes, but some of them leave room for alterations/creativity, while still falling under the umbrella of the idiom principle, as Sinclair (1991) puts it. They can all be retrieved from memory, but they also allow speech community speakers to have some creativity over them, guided by syntactic rules, such as the last two examples given. With further analysis on linguistic issues, based on how languages are structured, it is clear that syntax plays a major role in being able to sound “native-like” (or speech community-like, since L1 and L2 are theoretically stored and processed similarly in the brain). Laypeople don´t have to attend school to know how syntax works, speakers seem to either know it intuitively, which
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corroborates with Chomsky´s theory of Universal Grammar, or they have been exposed to syntactic structures many times during their acquisition phase, and they somehow internalized the process to a certain extent that everyone in the speech community seems to share a collective “syntactic code” and can therefore judge what is grammatical or ungrammatical. I use the “certain extent” expression since laypeople are not familiar with syntax used in poetry, or hyperbatons, for example. Syntax can look alien to a lot of speakers, depending on how it is used. The question is: are people used to syntactic structures just because they have spent years listening to how it is done or is it something biologically endowed (Chomsky, 1988)? The answer lies beyond the scope of this essay; in fact, this question might be unanswerable. However, since L2 speakers can potentially develop some “intuition” to L2 syntax, the fact that exposure plays a major role in formulae acquisition has to be taken into consideration. Syntax obviously varies a great deal across world’s languages. If speech community speakers of Portuguese (who also speak English as a second language) analyze sentences in the latter, they will try to shun Portuguese syntax away from that discourse since it is going to obviously meddle with English syntax; it is quite possible for a bilingual brain to do so, since both syntactic structures seem to overlap themselves in the brain, therefore interfering with each other every now and then; the brain has to learn to trigger or toggle off one or the other, depending on the situation; this is no easy task by all means, but in due time, it can be potentially achieved.
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In order for proficiency to be attained, a triad of elements has to be thoroughly mastered: syntax, lexis and pragmatics. The grammar of the language is buried in the triad, and is tacitly acquired, since laypeople don´t have to be taught on the nuts and bolts of it, let alone its prescriptive rules and guidelines. An illiterate person who grew up in an English-speaking speech community wouldn´t come up with a sentence like “Car I to new want buy.” As previously mentioned, people tacitly know the right order of words and how to properly place adjectives, adverbs, prepositions and objects in a sentence without having to know what those parts of speech mean. Moreover, they might not be aware of the plethora of prescriptive rules that are promoted by grammarians; in order to learn those, one must be properly taught in a schoollike environment; we can conclude that a speech community speaker can unconsciously produce sound grammatical sentences, using tacit rules of syntax. The same can be applied to lexis; pragmatics orbits the other two elements from a further distance, greatly influencing them.
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Oral-formulaic Composition
The study of oral composition in epic poetry is key to understanding how oral literature and linguistic tradition is carried from one generation to the next; Lord (1960) has contributed immensely on this matter. By analyzing how people react when using memorized language in social contexts, Lord was able to find evidence that oral poets have to sing their lines having little time to come up with new ideas, abiding by the constraints of certain metrics (such as the hexameter, used in Homeric verse). The bard has to have a database of memorized sentences, epithets, lexical items and other resources to aid in fluency maintenance; they practice their lines prior to presenting them to the audience, and they are fully aware of the sequence of episodes that has to take place in order for the story to be told successfully. However, a fair amount of those verses is prone to improvisation; this has to be guided by certain rules, such as metric, as previously mentioned. This means that a singer is not quoting the poem verbatim at all times; he has leeway to ponder where his “creativity guided by rules� can shine through.
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A parallel can be traced between how oral poetry is done versus how people prepare themselves for a public speaking session, for example. In both cases, planning ahead is paramount; the use of formulae and perception to audience reaction has to be measured and mitigated accordingly. This puts pressure on working memory; the more chunks one collects, the easier it is for memory to retrieve them. This process shows that it would’ve been nearly impossible for Homer to memorize every line from the Iliad without having to rely on some sort of improvisation when singing them; chances on proving how Homer did it, being illiterate and blind, are slim and remote. The fact is that, if one is to logically deduce how an epic poem is assembled, having more than 15600 lines to be memorized and retrieved from memory, one is likely to conclude that bards that have come after Homer had to use some creativity guided by aforementioned principles in order to maintain fluency and real-time singing; this would change the course of history and grant authorship of the Iliad and the Odyssey to several bards (aoidos in Greek) instead of granting it to Homer only. The point is clear: upon memorizing thousands of sequences, any speaker will have room for improvisation guided by the rules of syntax and pragmatics. In the case of Homer, they were guided by ancient Greek syntax and the hexameter; they had to abide by those rules. In the case of a contemporary English speaker, they will memorize a string, having the option of using that string verbatim, or adding new words to the slots that allow creativity to be used. An example that shows how this process is internalized is as follows: when uttering a string like “when the time comes”, for example, a speaker tacitly knows that there’s room for change in the use of the verb “comes”. They could say “when the time is
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right”, “when the time is appropriate”, etc. This keeps the first and original sentence as the main stem, and adds branch sentences that share the root “when the time _____” in common. The slot that is available for this sentence can be replaced accordingly, guided by syntactic intuition, and further filtered through pragmatic conventions of a given culture. Some literature in the field such as Lewis (1993) would describe the above as collocations; however, the formulaic approach towards sequences varies when compared to the lexical approach. The options you have to communicate the exact same thing as the stem sentence are more limited than the options you would have when simply applying collocations in a syntagmatic fashion; the fact is that there’s a gradient of similarity between the stem sentence and the other variations, guided by pragmatic and social principles, and they all orbit around the idea of using a formula, or certain simple variations to it, in order to say something within a given context. The collocation principle is related to inserting words with co-text, which doesn’t necessarily restrict the sentence to one single situation and idea. On another note, the example above could be explained by the rules of generative syntax (Chomsky 1965: 7-8) as well; but the detection of formulaicity in spoken language depends on the reports of speakers, meaning that formulaicity is observed in people’s speeches, which are an integral part of a myriad of social contexts. This leaves formulaic sequences and sentences attached to the Chomskyan concept of performance, which is not analyzed by generative syntax whatsoever, since it is not involved with speech itself, but with tacit knowledge instead; the fact that formulaicity is not necessarily generative-oriented doesn’t mean it conflicts with Chomsky’s beliefs; it just shows that it describes patterns of performance through strings of expressions that are
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part of the corpus of a speech community, rather than trying to deal with mental processes that are far beyond the level of consciousness. An observation has to be brought forth, though; intuition is ubiquitous, whether in generative syntax or phraseology and formulaicity, even if Chomsky doesn’t seem to say so. Intuition can be seen as the “dent in reality” caused by the observer effect (Tamulis, 2015: 4), meaning that any observation or judgment on syntax is itself an intuitive bias; syntactic theory relies on logic and scholar arbiters, formulaicity relies on corpus research and appointed arbiters, who are asked to provide information voluntarily; pragmatics is a very important aspect of the latter, while not being interesting to the former, since syntax and semantics are completely apart in generative syntactic theory. There is room for further research on the implications of Chomsky’s theories and formulaicity in general, though. Due to the fact that speakers are under pressure when speaking (Lord, 1960: 65), a fixed discourse structure depending on the social context is of paramount importance; this is the case in politics, auctions (Schmitt et al, 2004: 42), sports, and many other social situations; radio presenters and commentators, rappers, announcers, priests, public speakers, storytellers, and many others. Formulaic language can be analyzed and highlighted in the previously mentioned situations using transcripts of those activities; it could be added to a specific corpus and compared to other formulaic strings, or simply logged and linked to a certain context and sociolinguistic variation; the focus of the analysis will depend on the type and aim of the given research.
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The Use of Formulaic Language in ELT
This essay is interested in finding ways of applying formulaic sequences in the ELT setting. People in general regard fluency as speaking with few pauses and effortless thinking. It has been previously clarified that spontaneous speech is different than planned texts, but both modalities allow certain slots for creativity. Spontaneous speech is obviously going to be harder, since syntactic and semantic combinations have to come to fruition as one single package; this makes the use of prefabricated sentences and chunks vital for fluent conversation, aided by prosodic elements. The challenge for L2 students is that they tend to come up with sentences in a “segmented� manner; they analyze the verb tense, subject and lexis all separately, and that usually takes longer than simply having a preset formula ready to be uttered in due course. Students must be aware that they are to understand the whole phrase (Lewis, 2012: 121). The message that is being conveyed is what really matters; the sum is more important than its parts, and students can only see so if they are exposed to formulaic language within the adequate context. Moreover, trying to
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retrieve the original message by analyzing its parts individually doesn’t help the student see the bigger picture, and the latter is the one that is actually attached to pragmatic functions and contextual meaning. Michael Lewis’ The Lexical Approach has insightful thoughts on lexical chunks, institutionalized sentences, cloze procedures, and others. Outlining differences in formulaic language (FL) and the lexical methodology (TLA) developed by Lewis is important at this point. He states: “A great part of the learner’s task is to chunk unfamiliar material in meaningful ways and create more effective lexical phrases.” FL aims to present stem sentences to students and to develop a gradient of “possible branch sentences” that have similar meanings if analyzed within the same context of the original sentence; it is important to mention that, since social situations, contexts, cultures and speech communities vary a great deal, it is unreal to think any theory could potentially come up with every single sentence that is considered pragmatically sound, with adequate lexis and syntax. In order to try to describe some of those stem sentences, FL has to select a given speech community and apply empirical techniques and academic research in order to better describe this speech community’s most commonly used ones. TLA sees chunks from a different perspective: the stem sentence wouldn’t necessarily produce branch sentences that share semantic meaning; it would be a stem sentence that could potentially provide opportunities for new branch sentences, with new semantic meaning, using lexis and chunks as the main common factor among several sentences that ultimately differ in meaning through and through. The approach is similar, but the focus is not the same; FL focuses on presenting as many possibilities to that stem sentence as it can, given the context of the speech community 10
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that’s being studied. It leaves room for creativity, within certain slots and situations, but speech community speakers can deem this creativity “exotic”; the boundaries on how speakers grade “adequate” to “exotic” is what this paper tries to bring to light. If a speaker accidentally uses syntax from a different language to a formulaic stem sentence, it is very likely that speechcommunity speakers will deem it “anomalous”. If fluency is thought in terms of storing as many formulaic sentences that fall under the adequate and exotic categories to that community, then it means L2 speakers have a chance on mastering those sentences, provided they are exposed to them, in the appropriate context, and for a significant amount of time. Repetition and experience are key in the process. This is far from agreeing with any behaviorist claims, though; no one is obligated to use just those formulaic sentences in order to be fluent in a language. As previously mentioned, these sequences help people save calories and brain processing time. It’s the economy principle that guides every species out there. If we can save energy by storing whole sentences and using them accordingly, and if this is beneficial to the community as a whole, it will be a cognitive factor that influences cultural factors, since these formulaic sequences are prevalent in culture sharing and tradition in general (as previously pointed out by the oralformulaic theory of Parry and Lord). The formulaic system cannot live without the grammar system, though. If an L2 speaker decides to use grammar-only sentences, assembling them by deductive reasoning, that is, by analyzing the prescriptive rules of grammar and then using creativity to make them up, chances are (s)he will produce grammatical sentences that can be considered institutionalized (such as “Thank you for coming”, “It’s great to have you here”,
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etc.) or exotic/anomalous ones, using their L1 syntax or simply combinatorial choices that don’t necessarily produce sound formulaic strings. These grammar-only students usually end up speaking “textbook” English, due to the fact that they seem to rely on lexicon that was learned via texts or exercises. They transfer written grammar to spoken situations, using rules to create sentences, but with the interference of their L1, not only syntactically, but also pragmatically. There’s a lack of exposure to formulaic sequences and word strings from their L2; exposure is key, as previously mentioned, aided by pragmatics and L2 syntax. This shows that both systems (grammar and formulae) have to coexist in order for students to fully see the whole picture; but the role of how much grammar or how much linguistic knowledge an L2 speaker should know remains questionable, since there are many examples of people who have never been through proper education, yet they appropriate themselves of formulaic language when using spoken grammar, after having lived and being immersed in their L2 environment for long enough. This basically means that speakers recognize patterns inductively; the biological aspect is taken for granted, given the fact that the sheer fact of being human makes anyone capable of acquiring language (excluding the cases where impairment hinders such ability). Spiders spin webs, humans use language as their “brain software” in order to see the world and grasp reality; but spiders don’t have to be exposed to others spiders’ web-spinning techniques in order to build their own. Humans do need to be exposed to language in order to produce their own sentences; listening or gesturing are key during the acquisition phase, meaning that language, although biologically feasible due to genetic coding, wouldn’t come to fruition if not for exposure; 12
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this is the concept of I-language and E-language that Chomsky cites as being fundamental to human language. This essay brings forth the “F-aspect”, which could be either the fluency aspect, or the formulaic one, in order for thorough “communicative acquisition” to truly take place. The lacking factor here is that fluency in speaking seems to be achieved only when exposure to formulaic language is added to the equation. It is an aspect of language that is as important as the other ones mentioned so far, however it doesn’t seem to be regarded as scientifically interesting; literature on this matter is scarce, and has only been developed in the last 20 years, mostly in applied linguistics. Further research on bridging generative grammar, cognitive linguistics and other fields of linguistic theory to formulaic language could help us better understand how they are all somehow intertwined; even if intrinsically woven by just a single patch, they all share certain similarities, shining beams of light on different patches of darkness.
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4 FL is not a Markov-Chain Generator In “The Language Instinct”, Steven Pinker states: “A wordchain device is a bunch of lists of words (or pre-fabricated phrases) and a set of directors for going from list to list. (…) It is the simplest example of a discrete combinatorial system, since it is capable of creating an unlimited number of distinct combinations from a finite set of elements.” This type of generator could potentially create infinite strings of words, but they wouldn’t necessarily be considered formulaic; let us assume that such a generator, basing its calculations on probability of occurrence and transitioning from word to word using English as its corpus, comes up with the 3-word sequence “best laid plans”. It turns out that this sequence has been previously been uttered by a human being before; Scotsman Robert Burns used this sequence in “To A Mouse”, a poem written in 1785. This is Burns’ sentence: The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley. It means that “the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry”. Rumor has it that Burns was plowing a field one day and unwittingly ran over a mouse’s nest. The mouse probably deemed that shelter as its best shot for winter survival.
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Unfortunately, things can eventually go wrong, even when thoroughly planned out. The “gang aft agley” part comes from Scots dialect; it was replaced by “oft go awry”, or “oft go astray”, when quoted in literature or popular saying. What’s important here is that the string “best laid plans” has become idiomatic; it is now part of human culture, since people use it to describe the uselessness of making detailed plans when things can potentially go wrong no matter what. It can be retrieved from memory with minimal processing effort; it has become formulaic. The fact that the Markov chain generator has come up with the exact same string doesn’t mean that language works by placing words sequentially, according to the probability of their occurrence from left to right; when Burns came up with that line in his poem, he analyzed categories of words such as parts of speech and how those categories are ordered within a sentence; that is thoroughly explained by syntactic theory, structure-dependent sentences and the tree diagram; it is fair to observe that the principle on how treeing is conducted stands out in Chomskyan theory, notwithstanding that it doesn’t explain the function of such sentences. For generative grammar, it suffices to say that language works like a “tree”, that a sentence is composed of a verb phrase plus a noun phrase and to show that they are structure-dependent, a later word depends on an early one (such as either…or and if… then, or a question like “Is the man who is tall happy?”). The theory is oversimplified here for the sake of economy; it is indeed very complex (i.e. Chomsky’s “The Minimalist Program”). Roman Jakobson’s theory on the functions of language would describe Burns’ sentence as falling under the poetic function, focusing on the message for its own sake; if a reader is unaware of 15
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the story behind the nest and the plowing field in the poem, it would be impossible to retrieve what the author had in mind in the first place. This shows that, while being syntactically sound, it would still be considered semantically anomalous by most speakers of the language; it cannot be analyzed piece by piece. The pragmatic aspect, the functional aspect of a sentence is key to communication; the inference of the listener has to be borne in mind when one is coming up with a sentence in conversation. If one’s willing to create a message for its own sake, with hermetic meaning, they are more than entitled to do so; language works for that purpose as well. It can be truly abstract and nonsense, just like mathematics can deal with simple daily operations or universes with a million dimensions; the former is feasible and part of real life, while the latter is abstract and nonsense, if seen from the light of reality usefulness. Formulaic language would fall under the “utility” aspect of information, saving time and effort, sharing a common code between speaker and listener. It can be found in most Jakobsonian functions. Chomsky shows that anomalous sentences such as “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” are completely grammatical but meaningless. Pinker (1994) affirms that Chomsky wrote that sentence not only to show that nonsense can be grammatical, but also to point that improbable word sequences are grammatically sound as well (the probability of “green” appearing after “colorless” is indeed very low). That seems to be the case, provided the sentence is not uttered and published to the public; if so, it becomes part of a shared culture and develops a potential for becoming formulaic, or institutionalized. Once uttered by Chomsky, the abstractness of that sentence simply died out; it became relevant to literature, poetry, science, or simply human trivia (it was even cited in “Bartlett’s 16
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Familiar Quotations”). In attempts to immortality and eternal fame, any human being could come up with a sentence like that, such as: Dimensionless cubist amphitheaters slumber frenetically. The probability that dimensionless is followed by cubist is nearly zero, since it’s a bit of a contradiction, and the same goes for the other sequences of the string; my sentence is grammatically well formed, but it doesn’t hold any meaning. According to Chomsky, the plausibility of this fact shows syntax and semantics are separate fields. Although meaningless, a lot of people have already tried to add meaning to that sentence, saying that ideas can be green, in terms of being new and fresh, and they can lie dormant, in a very disturbing way to the mind; there you have it, the sentence all of a sudden seems to come to life. The same can be applied to my sentence. There’s always a possibility for chasing meaning. That’s a human aspect of language decoding; language has always been used primarily for communication, and, as Paul Grice puts it, cooperation enables interaction, in order for communication to be effective.
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The Bards of Language
Speaking tends to receive less attention in course books, not being considered as prestigious as written language and its prescriptive grammar. Therefore, most courses end up focusing more on reading and writing, and give listening and speaking a secondary role; the communicative section of most course books is dealt with in one single page, as opposed to two or three pages for reading and analytical grammar. With regard to speaking exercises, most of them are unstructured and reflect on students’ daily habits, their take on certain subjects that can potentially be linked to the reading exercise of that specific lesson. In summary, the speaking skill in the classroom setting is not the one most teachers are comfortable with. The air is thick with awkwardness from students who don’t feel confident enough to produce sound sentences, teachers themselves don’t feel confident enough most of the time with their speaking ability, so most publishers end up focusing on the written aspect of language than its most important part, which is the communicative one.
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Classroom tension could be relieved by a different type of syllabus; a communicative syllabus, presenting formulaic language, lexical items, cultural contrasts, social events, pragmatic functions, contextualized speaking sessions using formulaic language that’s actually being taught to the student, and so much more. The speaking session should be seen as “singing time”; students come to class to learn new “songs”, “hymns”, and “poems”. They are to become the new “bards” of language. Structures have to be leaning on certain frames: a pragmatic frame, supported by a syntactic apparatus that serves as a foundation structure to formulaic and institutionalized lexis, leaving certain slots for creativity or alternative lexical fillings.
Research on formulaic language
So far, formulaic awareness in speaking classes hasn’t been extensively investigated empirically; some research projects were conducted in Schmitt et al. (2004), but the results are somewhat inconclusive, since the number of participants in such studies was not significant and the amount of time dedicated to those studies posed constraints in it as well. Some results were interesting enough, such as the findings that students show greater awareness of formulaic sequences when reading them in texts. A negative aspect of some of these studies is that they want to assess how much formulaic language students know, but they don’t work with strategies to help them memorize the sequences. There’s also the fact that most courses seem to present limited formulaic strings, such as idioms, conjunctions, and scattered expressions. No study has ever focused on strategies to present formulaic language, and then finding ways to help students memorize the sequences they’ve learned. 19
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Students have to be truly exposed to strings; they have to be aware that language works the way it does. They are not immersed in the context where they listen to formulaic language in real life, being used in the right place, at the right time. A good motto for a student of formulaic language should be “There’s no formulaic language surrounding me. I have to immerse myself in it.” Learner autonomy is crucial for the process to succeed. Students have to constantly look for opportunities outside the classroom to immerse themselves in the contexts where formulaic language emerges.
Corpus Analysis and Exercises
Corpus analysis is a very handy tool for teachers who are interested in statistical information regarding how widespread formulaic sequences are in society in general; one of the most known tools is the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Using such corpus in speaking activities with students, making them aware that they can link formulaic sentences and sequences to specific pragmatic situations and then developing exercises to practice their memorization is a great path to take so students can excel at speaking. Research is still scarce, but the little that has been done so far has showed improvements in fluency; McGuire (2009) showed that after 5 weeks, an experimental group of L2 learners on formulaic language scored higher than the non-experimental group on speech rate and fluency. Students have to be more exposed to “speech community lingo”, meaning that the more language-fluency-oriented a classroom is, the easier it is for a student to notice prosodic elements such as rhythm, pausing, intonation, stress, etc. Exercises on memorizing native-like formulaic ways to talk 20
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about habits, hobbies and entertainment in general can be truly beneficial; if native speakers are not around, YouTube videos previously selected by the teacher can help students tremendously, in terms of boosting their listening while presenting cultural background, pragmatic functions and phonological aspects all at once. Besides video exposure and native speaker encounters, students can improve greatly by listening to their own recording sessions. Upon reflecting on previous experiences, students can in hindsight pretend they are listeners of their own speech production, having time to look for slips, or opportunities where formulaic strings could have been used, or to evaluate how their prosody is, while checking on their phonological performance overall. This contributes to learner autonomy, and memorization. If opportunities for feedback arise, the teacher could potentially focus on formulaic language, as opposed to deductive grammar.
Spaced Repetition
Fluency is related to how retrieval of data is done in the brain. If a string is retrieved whole from memory, they are usually produced with faster speed and more confidence than completely fresh sentences. Greater improvements can be achieved if students are exposed to spaced repetition, incorporating increasing intervals of time between sessions, revisiting them, and presenting learned material from a different perspective, exploring the spacing effect. Formulaic strings are numerous, in varied contexts, so learners have to be exposed to them repetitively in order to retain their function and occurrence. The use of technology is truly beneficial for spaced repetition to be well implemented, since using tablets and computers
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can increase the number of possibilities students are exposed to, information can be gathered statistically, and feedback can be done instantaneously through automated software, such as learning-management systems, which can report scores immediately to teachers and students, while keeping track of spacing intervals. Herman Ebbinghaus, a German psychologist, was the first person to describe the learning curve, and carried out experiments designed to measure how quickly we forget. He ended up developing the forgetting curve, concluding that we tend to forget brand new information that is presented to us in less than 60 minutes. Formulaic sequences that are presented in one lesson have to appear again in set intervals of time, so students can encode that new information in memory. Pimsleur (1967) developed the graduated-interval call; it focuses on repetitions in very short intervals, with very precise timings. His paper mentions intervals ranging from 5 seconds to 2 years. Either way, information is constantly being retrieved, simulating how this retrieval could potentially happen in real life, since opportunities for language use arise in spaced intervals most of the time.
Learning vs. Acquisition
Abutalebi et al. (2001), on multilingualism and language areas in the brain, affirms that people who speak more than one language have similar areas in the brain that are activated during language use. L1 and L2 can be used either simultaneously or separately. Either way, the areas that are activated in the brain are the same; around Broca’s area, if the speaker has acquired his L2 earlier in life; if acquired after the critical period, the language is still stored in the vicinity of Broca’s, but not exactly at the same spot. 22
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This shows the process of acquisition is very similar, although not identical, since there is more than just a single language involved. Storing 2 languages in the brain could be similar to how computers work using more than one operating system. However, in the case of computers, the operating systems don’t overlap and act simultaneously, they are toggled on and off depending on the user’s will. Bilingual speakers must be able to deal with L1/L2 interference at all times, triggering each in due time. It is evident that most formulaic sequences in L2 will lie outside the realm of formulaic sequences in L1; therefore, it is of paramount importance that students relate L2 experiences to the real world, just like they would do if they were using their L1.
Collocation vs. Formulaic Sequence
Lewis (1993) relates collocations to inserting words with cotext. Carter (1988: 163) states that “Collocation is an aspect of lexical cohesion which embraces a relationship between lexical items that regularly co-occur”. Collocation is more prone to various possibilities; strings of formulaic sequences, even sentences, can be entirely or partly fixed, and have no semantic variation within branch sequences that come out of them. The only way to truly differentiate them is via semantic analysis, since FL is mostly interested in finding patterns that become institutionalized within a given speech community. Sequences like “Let me help you, dude” or “Do you need a hand, man?” could potentially share semantic and pragmatic value in the context of providing assistance to friends and colleagues. The whole sentence has to be analyzed under the same semantic value. If collocations are suddenly brought to light, the focus of the sentence would shift and semantic value wouldn’t necessarily 23
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hold its meaning, such as in “Do you need _____, man?” or “Let me _____” and then feeling free to stick as many collocations as possible, in order to find various contextual situations where they could be used in real life. It’s different than finding a sequence and coming up with semantically similar branch sequences in order to maintain contextual relevance and pragmatic function.
Formula appeals to Culture
Every sentence that is uttered by a speaker implicitly shares background knowledge with the culture that that speaker is settled in. There are thousands of formulaic sentences out there, so function and context are very important into triggering the right retrieval of strings. Moreover, a huge amount of background knowledge that is not contained in the meanings of the words themselves plays a major role as well. How things are historically said by previous generations, parents, friends, television, movies and other cultural sources of information will eventually shape the way these strings are uttered and memorized by everyone in the speech community. They are all cultural conventions, that can allow for creativity to shine or be very fixed in form, having to be used a single way in order for information to be conveyed and for the economy principle to be maintained. The other cultural factor that is problematic for L2 speakers is the fact that metaphors and collocations have to be analyzed under L2 scrutiny, otherwise, clashing experiences with L1 and L2 collocational associations will rise and it will be very difficult for the student to master these sequences. Exposure in this part of the process is even more important, using spaced repetition guidelines as tools for feedback.
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It is interesting to notice that so many multiword expressions are memorized by the whole community, probably because most of us share the “intuitive” knowledge that they all sound “right”; the fact that we see ourselves in others and need social approval can also play a role, since talking like your peers is strategically pertinent in not feeling like an outcast before your clique. The fact that we settle a dispute and not extinguish or kill it has a lot to do with collective decisions. The formulaic sequences that periodically appear in certain speech genres such as journalism, sports broadcasts, auctioneers, weather reports, horse racing, priests, preachers, politicians and others is indeed linked to either a preference for register, or achieving certain effects, but they all become institutionalized and shared by all within that specific genre in the community. So it ends up being a byproduct of cultural sharing in the long run. The same happens with music and literature. It is not rare to see that many artists prefer certain expressions and saying when penning lyrics for their songs, and if a text is retold to future generations, it will usually hold formulaic strings and some portions of it will eventually become fixed. This can be explained by preference in style and the economy principle. We conclude that formulaic language reduces processing load, enhances the output of a speaker, is shared among cultures, is a tool for personality assertion within a collective group, etc. It proves that mastering these sequences is key to cultural integration and acceptance. It helps people with community integration and collective identity.
How much time is needed to learn them?
Lewis (1993) shows that, in order to acquire native-like vocabulary, students would need 6,000 hours of study, 8 hours a day, every day for 2 years. This seems to be unfeasible for both 25
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teachers in the classroom setting and for publishers to come up with materials for a course like that. If classrooms are flipped, meaning that there’s more time in class for productive skills and focus on lexical production, and less time for analytical grammar and receptive skills (which would be given via video lectures whenever students want to have access to them), more time would be allotted to create an atmosphere of “cultural background” and “speech community”like situations, in order for students to role play and actually deal with the fluency aspect of language. If students had 1 hour a day dedicated to English learning, it would take 16 years for them to be able to complete the 6,000 hours Lewis recommends. Teachers have to promote learner autonomy and internet use on situations where immersion is not available, otherwise, learning English will become a lifelong pastime for everyone. Teachers are used to that, but most students have the false idea that they will be able to learn a language in 18 months, due to campaigns on television that advocate that such a feat is possible. Language institutions should be held accountable for that; bad promotion leads to frustration in the long run. Teachers, being facilitators of knowledge, should also help students go beyond course books, and find ways to immerse themselves in the L2, via literature, video, internet resources and the like.
Formula - The bigger picture
It is very hard to come up with an overall theory on formulaic sequences since they seem to cover all aspects of life. All other linguistic aspects focus on smaller units, such as morphology, word formation in general, manipulation of collocations, antonyms and synonyms, word grammar, de-lexicalized words,
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conceptual metaphors, etc. FL seems to perform several unconnected functions, providing solutions to various linguistic issues. It has been previously mentioned that the desire to be part of a community, to speak fluently and native-like, to be understood by other people who have important roles in society is a goal every speaker has when mastering sequences within a specific genre.
The use of FL as a Device for Manipulation
It is clear that it is very difficult for FL to be broken down into categories, but Wray (2002) beautifully shows that, when speakers want to assert identity within a group, they work with a mixture of functions and effects, such as: Functions – changing one’s physical environment (F1), asserting separate identities (F2) or group identities (F3) Effects – Satisfying physical and emotional needs (F1/E1), being taken seriously (F2/E2), separating from the crowd (F2/ E3), overall membership, place in hierarchy, ritual Types – commands, bargains, requests, apologies, politeness markers (all T1), storytelling (T2), threats (t3), performatives (T4), etc. Examples: F1 + E1 + T1 = Keep off my property/I’m sorry/Could you please___? F2 + E2 + T2 = You’re not going to believe this… This helps with a sense of identity within a group, without adding stress to the hearer, who shares the same expressions when (s)he becomes the manipulator. This “battle” between speaker and listener reinforces group membership; it sets values
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and norms, and shows how willing one is in order to abide by collective standards.
FL and Metaphors
Metaphors go through the same process as other word items; when becoming institutionalized or formulaic by community standards, they contribute to conceptualizing the system of that given culture, which is reflected in everyday language and gains the potential to be added to the corpus of collective FL that is part of that community. Metaphors are more conducive to individual inspiration; a speaker can create a new one (just like slumbering amphitheaters or sleepy ideas), and if they follow the same structures (frames) of conventionalized metaphors, they have the potential to become institutionalized. The way metaphor is thought is a fundamental and natural part of our cognitive system, since it is based on previous experiences and conceptual imagination. A substantial amount of our knowledge is metaphorical in nature. When trying to make sense of abstract scientific principles and theories, one structures a concept based on previous and simpler ones, using language to bridge them all. When trying to conceive the size of the atomic nucleus, you can think of a metaphor like “the proton is like a soccer ball; the electron shell, which is the energy level, orbits the soccer ball from afar, being the uppermost bleacher of the stadium.� This helps you better picture the distance between the orbiting electron and its nucleus. This shows you that an atom is filled with a lot of empty space, and that the nucleus is much smaller than the orbiting layers of electrons surrounding them.
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Metaphors, analogies, comparisons and other figures of speech make humans perceive reality from the perspective of that language; it doesn’t mean reality has to be seen according to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but the exchange of cognitive reasoning and linguistic procedures definitely shapes how one sees reality. That action helps build a social construction of reality, aided by linguistic cues and cognitive perception.
The use of FL in Coursebooks
In the classroom setting, it is very common to use a coursebook as a guide to students and lesson planning. They are well structured, graded, and follow a coherent program on language development. Students and their parents also expect a “full course” to use a coursebook, in order for this course fulfill expectations and to have that “successful” feeling of completion at the end of the semester. Coursebooks are obviously elaborated with market sales in mind, but they do respond to what the same market wants from them. That means that adding formulaic language to the spoken section of a coursebook depends on teacher engagement; this has to be a component that most teachers are willing to teach in class. While still not widely known out there, FL has a lot to contribute, as already mentioned in previous sections of this essay. Teachers usually request what they have used in previous situations, but FL has never been truly explored in the publishing market, so further research on how exercises should be modeled, and how sections should be arranged in order for a successful FL program to be implemented in real life is needed. This doesn’t mean that the whole syllabus is going to be
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FL-oriented from now on. Even though a grammar syllabus is not ideal, ELT scholars and publishers should come to terms on what has to be offered to students. Skill-based approaches, learner autonomy, interdisciplinary activities and much more is already pervasive in the publishing market, which means ELT is becoming less prescriptive as time goes by; what students desperately need now is exposure to real life language, and not to “textbook” English anymore. This has to be changed in ELT mentality; the fact that one knows about a language doesn’t mean one is fluent in it. Since being part of a community is very much linked to being an “altruistic” speaker and focusing on the hearer, due to collective implied agreements and a silent contract between both interlocutors, students have to be aware that production is actually cooperation and interaction; it’s shared knowledge, performed with social functions and cultural underpinnings.
“Nativese”
Knowing a language is not about being acquainted to its isolated words; the strings and sequences of those words combined is what makes language interesting in the first place. The greatest challenge for a non-native speaker of a language is to decipher the secrets of “Nativese”, which is the language most L2 speakers think speech community speakers speak. It is plainly wrong to think that only native speakers can master Nativese; firstly, this term doesn’t even do justice to formulaic language; secondly, there are numerous examples of people who speak English as a second language but were able to somehow master those sequences. The secret is related to how much exposure one has, and how many cultural opportunities arise when using and listening to those sequences in context. 30
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People are exposed to different experiences and inputs, so there’s variability even within native speakers, as to how many sequences are actually remembered by speaker A or B. The fact that reading plays a role has to be taken into consideration; the more one reads, the more immersed in a genre or cultural niche one is, so it is more likely that they will eventually attach certain sentences to certain situations; it is not as rich as discussing and listening to those same situations in real life, but it is much better than the “textbook” English approach.
Linguistic Theorems
It would be absolutely phenomenal to be able to come up with a unified linguistic theory; but it is clear that this goal is not plausible. One can only wonder if linguistic theory were like the natural sciences, where there seems to be more agreement among theories. Formulaic language can potentially be a converging aspect among the various theories that are out there. Some of them have been briefly mentioned in this essay, and an analysis can be brought forth, pointing out their similarities and overall differences. Strings can be segmented and analyzed phonologically, syntactically, or morphologically. It is similar to looking at a DNA molecule and being aware that a single molecule is comprised of millions of other molecules, that are also composed of billions of atoms. The closer you look at a sequence, the more details you’re going to find, depending if you’re shining the light on a specific patch of darkness. If the flashlight is illuminating the syntactic aspect of it, then details will arise and “truth” will be unveiled; but truth is always relative to the conceptual system that is being used at that point, whether it’s syntax, semantics, or others. There’s no absolute truth, since the fact that observing “reality” 31
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demands a cognitive perception of it, thus becoming a “dented” understanding of this phenomenon. The fact that we cannot see contrasting theories as one single thing, analyzed from different perspectives and truths is due to our difficulty in perceiving what the “continuum” is, as Chomsky puts it. He gives the example of the willow tree that has one of its branches cut off; the branch is planted right beside its “parent”, but our human perception doesn’t let us see both things as one single being, since the branch has been cut off. If it has no connection to the original willow, it is not the same willow, even if it their DNA is the same. You might trick yourself into believing that it is the same willow, because you trust in science and know that the DNA is the same, so that second willow is a clone of the first one, but your mind cannot grasp this type of continuity no matter what. It is a human trait; just like you and I can’t grow wings. It is not human-like to do so. There’s no such thing as linguistic theorems, unfortunately. No universal truths, like the Pythagorean theorem, for example.
Cognitive Grammar
CG considers the symbol as the basic unit of language; the entire structure of the language is seen as piloted by the messages it conveys, so it differs from Chomskyan beliefs, for example. It makes no distinction between the various areas of linguistics such as lexis and syntax (Wray 2002: 274). Wray goes on to describe that cognitive grammar is akin to formulaic language since analytic and holistic systems are contemplated by it. But in Cognitive Grammar, units become formulaic through a process of automatization, having first been composed of smaller units. This is not consistent with FL theory in general since it differs on how a language is naturally acquired. Langacker, the developer 32
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of CG theory, draws a parallel between linguistic structure and aspects of visual perception. FL and CG share similarities when expressions are brought to light. To CG, an expression derives its meaning by flexibly invoking an open-ended set of cognitive domains, such as concepts of various degrees of complexity. It focuses primarily on chasing meaning; the latter depends on the conceptual content it evokes. But this evocation has to be focused on the hearer, since the speaker is altruistic, according to FL. There’s a possibility of chaining prototypes as stem sentences, and grammatical characterizations of parts of speech prove efficacious in describing how relational expressions function as noun modifiers and in clausal organization. Linguistic meaning is inherently dynamic, and this corroborates with a social construction of meaning, that can be of great use to community A and suffer alterations to community B, for example. It deviated from mainstream linguistic theory and shares some aspects with Wray’s theory of Heteromorphic Distributed Lexicon, but it is still early to pinpoint how much contribution it can give to the field of FL research in the future.
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CONCLUSION The theory of Formulaic Language has come a long way since it first started being described by scholars in the early 80s. Most of the research on it is fairly recent, and there’s room for future empirical research and rationalist essays in attempts to bridge various fields of study with such a broad concept such as FL. It is not clear if FL has a center spot in language research, although it does seem to play a major role in real life language and social interaction. Fixed frames, ready-made expressions, institutionalized sentences are all an intrinsic part of being human and sharing knowledge in this world. Human beings have the ability to form abstract symbol vocabularies, which can then be the subject of manipulation. The identity principle, the promotion of the self, and how one is seen by a speech community plays an important role on the maintenance of pre-fabricated sequences that are used according to certain social contexts. An idiolect (an individual’s distinctive and unique use of language) can be seen as a future potential dialect; but the former is influenced by the latter, and vice-versa. Formulaic language is a byproduct of identity salience, guided by collective implied principles. Language emerges from cooperation and collaboration; it can be abstract in someone’s mind, functioning as an operating system, but its true potential blossoms when it is shared within a community, and carried over generations, embracing tradition, culture and novelty.
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REFERENCES Abutalebi J., Miozzo A., Cappa S. F. (2000). Do subcortical structures control “language selection” in polyglots? Evidence from pathological language mixing. Neurocase 6, 51–5610.1093/ neucas/6.1.56 Austin,
J.L.
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Utterances.
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University Press. Carter, R. (1988). Vocabulary, cloze and discourse: an applied linguistic view. Longman. Chomsky, N. (1957). Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton. Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Chomsky, N. (1988). Language and Problems of Knowledge: The Managua Lectures. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Cowie, A. P. (1988). Stable and creative aspects of vocabulary use. In R. Carter & M. McCarthy (eds.) Vocabulary and Language Teaching. London, New York: Longman. Erman, B. and Warren, B. (2000). The idiom principle and the open-choice principle. Text 20: 20-60. Henry, A. (1996). Natural chunks of language: teaching speech through speech. English for Specific Purposes 15 (4). Hjelmslev, L. (1969). Prolegomena to a theory of language. University of Wisconsin Press. Howarth, P. (1998b). Phraseology and second language proficiency. Applied linguistics 19. Langacker, R. W. (1986). An introduction to cognitive grammar. Cognitive Science 10.
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Lewis, M. (2012). The lexical approach. Cengage Learning. Lewis, M. (1997). Pedagogical Implications of the Lexical Approach. In J. Coady & T Huckin (eds.) Second language vocabulary acquisition. Cambridge: CUP. Lord, Albert B. (1960. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lyons, J. (1968). Introduction to theoretical linguistics. Cambridge: CUP. Nattinger, J.R., and DeCarrico, J. S. (1992). Lexical Phrases and Language Teaching. Oxford: OUP. Pawley, A. and Snyder, F.H. (1983). Two puzzles for linguistic theory: nativelike selection and nativelike fluency. In Language and Communication, J. C Richards and R. W. Schmidt (eds). London: Longman. Pinker, S. (1994). The Language Instinct. Harmondworth: Penguin. Schmitt, N. (2000). Vocabulary in Language Teaching. Cambridge: CUP. Sinclair, J. (1991). Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford: OUP. Wray, A. (2002). Formulaic Language and the Lexicon. Cambridge: CUP.
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About the Author
Alex Tamulis
I was born in 1982 in São Paulo, Brazil. I’m currently an academic consultant for Macmillan Education, a publisher company focused on coursebooks for English language teaching. I’m also a linguistics major at the University of São Paulo. My main fields of interest are: theoretical linguistics, the origins of language and cognitive science. With regard to syntax, I’m interested in transformational grammar,
government
and
binding
theory
and
the
minimalist program (Chomskyan syntax, in general). I also have a BA in Social Communication. In my free time I like to play the bass (I’m a huge fan of Geddy Lee). I also like reading novels of various genres, from Joyce to Palahniuk.
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