Formulaic language in native and learner English – a corpus-based study of silent pauses

The aim of this on-going study is to investigate whether intersegmental silent pauses with regard to formulaic sequences in native speaker English and Polish learner English occur in similar patterns, and whether the selection of the most common two- and three-word phrases in both types of English is alike. The analysis was conducted on the basis of the conversational sub-corpus of the British National Corpus and the spoken part of the PELCRA Learner English Corpus (Pęzik 2012), from which potential lexical bundles were extracted. Then, temporal analysis of audio samples from both corpora corresponding to the potential lexical bundles was performed in order to determine their prosodic features. As a result, the degree of relations between formulaicity of an utterance and its prosodic features, as well as the range of the most frequently used formulaic sequences was shown for both types of English analyzed.