Formulaic language (previously known as automatic speech or embolalia) is a linguistic term for verbal expressions that are fixed in form, often non-literal in meaning with attitudinal nuances, and closely related to communicative-pragmatic context.
[4] French psychiatrist Jules Séglas, on the other hand, defined the term embolalia as "the regular addition of prefixes or suffixes to words" and mentioned that the behavior is sometimes used by normal individuals to demonstrate to their interlocutor that they are paying attention to the conversation.
[6] The Irish poet William Butler Yeats argued for formulaic language experiments with his wife,[7] which provided him with symbols for his poetry as well as literary theories.
[11] Formulaic sequences can be of any length and can be used to express messages, functions, social solidarity and process information very fast without communication misunderstanding.
[14] Filled pauses vocalizations may be built around central vowels and speakers may differ in their preferences, but they do not appear to behave as other words in the language.
[15] They can either involve repetition, that is, the precise adjacent duplication of a sound, syllable, word or phrase, or insertion, which refers to a retraced restart with the addition of new unretraced lexical items.
[17] Research has shown that people were less likely to use formulaic language in general topics and domains they were better versed in because they were more adept at selecting the appropriate terms.
[20] Formulaic language is more likely to occur at the beginning of utterance or phrase possibly because of greater demand on planning processes at these junctures.
[21] Features of formulaic language, like filled pauses or repetitions, are most likely to occur immediately prior to the onset of a complex syntactic constituent.
[26] Dechert (1980) found that the more fluent utterances exhibited more pauses at those junctures and lesser within the "episodic units", leading him to posit that the study subject was able to use the narrative structure to pace his own speech with natural breaks in order for him to scout for the words and phrases that are to follow subsequently.
[20] In Wood's book, he suggested that when a high degree of cognitive load occurs, such as during expository speech or impromptu descriptions of complex interrelated topics, even native speakers can suffer from disfluency.
[20] In Beattie and Butterworth's (1979) study, low frequency content words and those rated as contextually improbable were preceded by hesitations such as fillers.
[33] This is further supported by Schnadt and Corley where they found that prolongations and fillers increased in words just before multiple-named or low frequency items.
[34] The different roles the addresser played (such as a sister, a daughter or a mother) greatly influences the numbers of disfluencies, particularly, fillers produced, regardless of length or complexity.
[35] There is a common agreement that disfluencies are accompanied by important modifications both at the segmental and prosodic levels and that speakers and listeners use such cues systematically and meaningfully.
[14] A study conducted by Clark and Foxtree (2002)[40] mentioned that parts of formulaic language, such as fillers, serve a communicative function and are considered integral to the information the speaker tries to convey, although they do not add to the propositional content or the primary message.
[40] Speakers produce filled pauses (e.g. "Uh" or "Um") for a variety of reasons, including the intention to discourage interruptions or to gain additional time to plan utterances.
[16] Another communicative goal includes the attention-impelling function,[4] which explores another purpose of hesitation forms as being to dissociate oneself slightly from the harsh reality of what is to follow.
[45] Children with developmental coordination disorder are unable to formulate certain kinds of voluntary speech; however, they may speak set words or phrases spontaneously, constituting formulaic language—although they may not be able to repeat them on request.