The linguistics community at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee is planning to hold a symposium on the topic of 'formulaic language'.  The symposium, which will be held on the campus of UWM in the Union Ballroom April 18-21, 2007, will be the 25th in the series of the once-annual UWM Linguistics Symposia.  

By formulaic language we mean multi-word collocations which are stored and retrieved holistically rather than being generated de novo with each use. Examples of formulaic language include idioms, set expressions, rhymes, songs, prayers, and proverbs; they may also be taken to include recurrent turns of phrase within more ordinary sentence structures.  These are notable in ordinary speech as well as in ritualized speech events such as sports broadcasts, weather reports, sermons, etc.  

In our symposium, we are aiming to explore the issue of formulaic language from a variety of perspectives.  To this end, our keynote speakers are scholars whose specializations range over a large spectrum of language-based study, including specialists in corpus-based linguistics, psycholinguistics, phonology, phonetics, typology, and related fields.

Questions concerning the Symposium can be addressed to Michael Noonan:  noonan@uwm.edu