To treat spoken and written formulaic language in the same fashion is erroneous. It masks the fact that the meaning of spoken formulaic language is encoded to a large extent in its prosody. This book offers a new perspective on formulaic language: it argues that while past research often treats formulaic language as a lexical phenomenon, the phonological aspect of it is more fundamental.

The corpus-based descriptions of prosody outlined in this book not only deepen our understanding of the nature of formulaic language but have important implications for English Language Teaching and...