Theoretical linguists have in recent years concentrated their attention on the productive aspect of language, wherein utterances areformed combinatorically from units the size of words or smaller. This paper will focus on the contrary aspect of language, wherein utterances are formed by repetition, modification, and
concatenation of previously-known
phrases consisting of more than one
word. I suspect that we speak
mostly by stitching together
swatches of text that we have heard
before; productive processes have
the secondary role of adapting the
old phrases to the new situation.
The advantage of this point of view
is that it has the potential to
account for the observed linguistic
behavior of native speakers, rather
than discounting their actual
behavior as irrelevant to their
language. In particular, this
point of view allows us to concede
that most utterances are produced
in stereotyped social situations,
where the communicative and
ritualistic functions of language
demand not novelty, but rather an
appropriate combination of
formulas, cliches, idioms,
allusions, slogans, and so forth.
Language must have originated in
such constrained social contexts,
and they are still the predominant
arena for language production.
Therefore an understanding of the
use of phrases is basic to the
understanding of language as a
whole.