To apply the same approaches to analysing spoken and written formulaic language is problematic; to do so masks the fact that the contextual meaning of spoken formulaic language is encoded, to a large extent, in its prosody. In The Prosody of Formulaic Sequences, Phoebe Lin offers a new perspective on formulaic language, arguing that while past research often treats formulaic language as a lexical phenomenon, the phonological aspect of it is a more fundamental facet.

This book draws its conclusions from three original, empirical studies of spoken formulaic language, assessing intonation unit boundaries as well as features such as tempo and stress placement. Across all studies, Lin considers questions of methodology and conceptual framework.

The corpus-based descriptions of prosody outlined in this book not only deepen our understanding of the nature of formulaic language but have important implications for English Language Teaching and automatic speech synthesis.