Formulaicità in cinese: tassonomie, funzioni e implicazioni per la didattica

Formulaicity, or the tendency of words to co-occur in regular patterns, is a well-known phenomenon in linguistics. Starting from the 1990s with the development of corpus technology, linguists have been able to observe the pervasiveness of formulaic sequences in human language, and it is becoming increasingly obvious that most communication is tied to these phrasal expressions. Building upon corpus data, in order to explain the “unrandomness” in the distribution of words, Sinclair (1991) proposed that the holistic processing of prefabricated material is the preferred processing mode, whereas analytic processing only plays a temporary supporting role. The implications of this hypothesis are relevant to many fields of linguistics, including the research on second language acquisition and foreign language teaching. The systematic study of formulaicity in Chinese started in the early 2000s; since then, several papers on this topic have been published in Mainland China; nonetheless, the analysis, the description, and the classification of the formulaic sequences of the Chinese language are still at an early stage. Even so, the research into formulaic language in Chinese has the potential to answer certain questions which may not be easily answered elsewhere. On the other hand, the analysis of the peculiarities of Chinese formulae may bring important advantages to Chinese teaching and learning. Chengyu, also known as Chinese four-character idioms, constitute a representative case. On the one hand, they share many characteristics with idioms in western languages, which may help linguists obtain a deeper insight into the phenomenon of idiomaticity in human languages; on the other hand, their peculiarities for what concerns aspects such as form, syntactic behavior, and register make it necessary to develop specific teaching techniques in order to facilitate learners’ comprehension and acquisition of their meaning, grammatical properties, communicative functions, and cultural value