542 Book reviews / System 37 (2009) 538–549

Formulaic Language: Pushing the Boundaries, Alison Wray (Ed.), Oxford University Press, Oxford (2008).

305 pp

It is said that archaeologists researching the Nazca lines in Peru thought for years they were simply a net-work of ancient roads, until somebody thought to fly over them and followed the boundaries to find that thelines actually formed enormous geoglyphs of birds and other creatures. If there is one thing that Alison Wraydoes exceedingly well, it is to show us the bigger picture. She did so in her seminal (2002) book, and she opensher lens even wider this time, turning not only to clear-cut uses of formulaic language, but also exploring whathappens at the ‘boundaries’.

Wray’s latest book is structured into four parts: ‘Determining boundaries’, ‘Locating boundaries’, ‘Stud-ies at the boundaries’, and ‘Examining the boundaries’. The central tools for exploration are presented inChapter 2, in which Wray first revisits two important concepts introduced in Wray (2002) – the heteromor-phic nature of lexis and Needs Only Analysis (NOA) – and adds something new: the Morpheme EquivalentUnit (MEU). Briefly, what Wray means by a heteromorphic lexicon is that ‘words’ actually take on manyforms, and are not limited to strings of letters with blank spaces on either side. Furthermore, even thoughthe components of any word or string of words can by analyzed, the default mechanism is to not do sounless necessary or extraordinarily required – in other words, analysis by ‘needs only’. The precedingtwo concepts add principled justification for a new definition of what constitutes a formulaic lexical item,the MEU:

The MEU is defined as a word or word string, whether incomplete or including gaps for insertedvariable items, that is processed like a morpheme, that is, without recourse to any form-meaningmatching of any sub-parts it may have. (p. 12)

The main difference between the MEU and Wray’s earlier ‘formulaic sequence’ (Wray and Perkins, 2000;Wray, 2002) is that, whereas the definition of the formulaic sequence was intended as a comprehensive con-struct to help explore the nature of formulaicity, the MEU is more of a theoretical statement about the natureof the mental lexicon itself. In essence, the MEU is a kind of lexical equalizer, eliminating any putative differ-ence in status between morpheme, word or string of words.

As in Wray (2002), an impressive array of examples is supplied throughout the book to help illustrate whatshe means. Part One starts off with some humor, including the following joke (p. 25):

Q: What’s the definition of a will?

A: Huh, everyone knows that. It’s a dead giveaway.

According to Wray, such jokes play with the boundaries of formulaicity. They require the reader to processthe idiom in a way that is unusual, with recourse to sub-parts, in order to get the joke. Wray’s point is relatedto NOA: it is not that an MEU cannot be decomposed, it is that doing so is a break from the default way ofprocessing it. Wray uses this theoretical stance to rebuke research that seeks to determine the nature of idiomprocessing by requiring participants to focus on idiom form in clinical, unnatural ways, to then spuriouslyconclude that formulaic items are not processed holistically. As Wray puts it, ‘they have evidence only thatidioms can be compositional. That is, experiments tap into a kind of processing that we can do but do notdo in most other circumstances’ (p. 30, italics in original).

A further, tragically humorous, example occurs in the case of ‘coonass’ (Chapter 14). In the mid-1990s, anAfrican American employee of the US Department of Energy sued her employer on the basis of her ‘shock’and ‘outrage’ (p. 169) upon receiving a certificate bestowing upon her the title of ‘Temporary Coon Ass’. Itturns out that, at least in Louisiana and east Texas, a ‘coon ass’ is actually a term derived from the French‘connasse’, used among the Cajuns from that region more as a term of endearment than insult, and certainlynot as a racial slur. We return, therefore, to the boundaries: the person who issued the certificate did notdecompose the expression in his or her mind; to that person, ‘coon ass’ is an MEU. The recipient, however,exemplified NOA; since the words in combination held no special meaning in her lexicon, she had no choicebut to focus on the only words that had morphemic status for her.

Book reviews / System 37 (2009) 538–549 543

Clearly, therefore, Wray supports the view that formulaic language is used by default, and in Part Two pre-sents a theoretical basis for what drives MEUs in the first place. Wray first aligns her theory of NOA withPattern Grammar (Hunston & Francis, 2000) and Construction Grammar (e.g. Goldberg, 2003), since thoseaccounts of language structure are sympathetic to the view that grammar is specific to exemplars in a lan-guage, and emerges from patterns of usage. Wray continues along this data-driven line of theory, extendingit to the identification of MEUs. According to Wray, although no proof of the theoretical underpinnings ofMEUs is available, informed judgments can be made on the basis of principled criteria (Chapter 9). Wray thenoutlines an eleven-point, criterion-based approach to identifying MEUs by using intuitive judgments aboutformulaicity.

Part Three presents a series of studies for the purposes of exemplification, including the ‘coonass’ case men-tioned earlier. Other interesting studies include the use of MEUs in technology to facilitate communication. Acomputer program called ‘TALK’ is described, which is used by speech-disabled individuals to facilitate com-munication. In essence, the apparatus is pre-programmed with the most useful MEUs, which are used holis-tically at the touch of a button, and this gestalt mode of communication is preferred until – by needs only – theuser must resort to more compositional communication for constructions not provided for by TALK.

Finally, in Part Four, Wray gives the boundaries one last shove, speculating that the default holistic pro-cessing in modern human languages has always been there, and presents a model which hypothesizes that alanguage with no external contact would fundamentally maintain non-compositionality (p. 212). Returningto the example of ‘coonass’, Wray posits that the sender of the certificates – a member of an esoteric speechcommunity – would explain the term to anyone from outside ‘to shift the boundary for default processing’ ofthe term to people who ‘would otherwise have no alternative but to break it down’ (p. 215). A proto-language,Wray argues, would have maintained compositionality for lack of NOA. Although no modern examples ofsuch a language exist, Wray draws on a unique source to exemplify an exclusively compositional language:military bugle calls:

Key to the nature of the calls was that they were freestanding and conveyed complete manipulativepropositions. [. . .] The calls were non-compositional and essentially arbitrary in form, in that a par-ticular tune was simply assigned a particular meaning. There could be internal repetitions of partsof the tune, but these were to ensure that the transmission could be identified even if not all of itwas heard. . .’ (p. 268)

The above quote also encapsulates the notion that, according to Wray, MEUs exist mostly to manipulatesituations and people, and to solve problems. The bugler assumes that his or her call will have the intendedeffect of, say, calling soldiers to eat, requiring little or no original formulation on the part of the player. Fur-thermore, it is the series of notes as a whole that carries the meaning and no focus on any individual notes isnecessary or desirable.

In the final analysis, Wray unequivocally makes her point and makes it well. There is plenty of evidence tosupport the view of NOA as linguistic reality, and that the MEU exists as the preferred mode of processing.However, there are times over the course of the book when one wonders if there is a little too much ‘bound-aries’ going on, and not enough of the middle bit. Wray provides a steady staple of original, diverse, and oftenentertaining examples throughout the book, but it is not always clear to the reader where the author is goingwith all the fanfare, nor how one section or sub-section connects with those that precede or follow it. There is aclear payoff by the end of it all, though.

There may be those who will feel frustrated that yet another term – the MEU – has been introduced intothe field of phraseology. In fact, the definition itself may not seem, at first glance, to contribute much morethan that of the formulaic sequence. Although the difference between the two may seem subtle, the MEUmay actually be as theoretically significant to the study of formulaic language as John Sinclair’s Idiom Prin-ciple (Sinclair, 1991). As Wray states at the end of the book, ‘(i)n fact, the notion of formulaic language assuch disappears, as it is absorbed into the broader notion of the MEU’ (p. 286). In other words, if the MEUas a construct is adopted widely, the study of formulaic language may one day actually become virtuallyredundant, subsumed instead into what is now simply called ‘vocabulary’. It seems a boundary worthpushing.

References

544 Book reviews / System 37 (2009) 538–549

Goldberg, A., 2003. Constructions: a new theoretical approach to language. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7 (5), 219–224.Hunston, S., Francis, G., 2000. Pattern Grammar: A Corpus-driven Approach to the Lexical Grammar of English. John Benjamins,

Amsterdam.Sinclair, J., 1991. Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford University Press, Oxford.Wray, A., 2002. Formulaic Language and the Lexicon. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.Wray, A., Perkins, M.R., 2000. The functions of formulaic language: an integrated model. Language and Communication 20 (1), 1–28.

Ron MartinezSchool of English Studies,

University of Nottingham,

University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD,

United Kingdom

E-mail address: ronmartinez@yahoo.com

doi:10.1016/j.system.2009.05.003

Japanese Applied Linguistics, Junko Mori and Amy Snyder Ohta. Continuum, London (2008). 364 pp

‘‘The devil’s own tongue.” This was the remark on the Japanese language by Francis Xavier, the first Jesuitmissionary who reached Japan in 1549. His impression of the language was no understatement because it wasliterally unknown to Westerners at that time. A century after Xavier’s arrival, however, Japan closed its doorto foreign countries in order to eradicate Christianity and the oppression inflicted by Spain and Portugal. Theclosure lasted for 250 years until the end of the Edo period, during which time only China and Holland wereallowed to trade at a single port in Nagasaki. Therefore, it has been only a hundred fifty years since the coun-try reopened its doors to the outside world. Globalization in the last few decades has certainly made Japan oneof the world’s leading countries. She has transformed herself from a mysteriously veiled country to a countrywhich has strong ties with the world in the realms of science, technology and commerce.

Today, the Japanese language is learnt by more than two million people outside Japan, which is ‘18.5 timeshigher than the number reported in 1979’, and the number of registered aliens in Japan reached two million in2005, which is ‘a 47.7% increase over a decade’ (p. 1). Certainly, the number of non-native speakers of Jap-anese is small compared with that of English. This does not mean, however, that issues in language educationin Japan are insignificant. In fact, various problems have arisen partly because of the dramatic increase inlearners within a short period of time. It is almost certain that the increase has been accelerated by globaliza-tion. Under these circumstances, teaching the practical knowledge of the language has become important inorder to help learners meet their communicative needs. Furthermore, many foreign residents in Japan con-front more serious problems when their children attend Japanese schools. Has the internationalization ofthe country made its educational system equally international? This question has arisen only recently in Japan.

The collection of eleven articles assembled by Mori and Ohta covers a wide range of areas in linguistics,pedagogy and language policies in Japan. In fact, Mori and Ohta devote much space in the introduction todiscussing the fundamental question, ‘What is applied linguistics?’ After citing definitions by some leadingapplied linguists, they claim that ‘applied linguistics has transformed itself over the last several decades byexpanding its interests and becoming a truly interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary field’ (p. 3). Given thisdefinition, ‘how various related fields should be mapped’ into applied linguistics depends on each linguist’sperspective and research interest (p. 4).

The research areas chosen by the eleven contributors in the book are diverse. They are divided into the fol-lowing four parts: Part One: Re-examination of Language in Action; Part Two: Ideologies, Diversities, andIdentities; Part Three: Japanese as an Additional Language and Part Four: Critical Reflection on LanguagePedagogy. Readers will find a wide spectrum of topics from issues in first-language research, ideologies andlanguage policies to second or foreign-language (JSL/JFL) teaching and the critical examination of language