Introduction

Anyone involved in language teaching is probably familiar with the fact that no matter how much practice students put into it, they do make mistakes. Their language is communicative but often far from the English that they would like to use. This may even be considered a disaster as the idealistic goal for many involved in foreign language teaching and learning is nativelike fluency and accuracy. A nativelike control over a foreign language is not restricted to the knowledge of and ability to manipulate morpho-syntactic rules or the possession of vast vocabulary consisting of separate lexical entries as well as idioms and idiomatic expressions. Of equal importance is the ability to choose those of them which would be used by a native speaker in a given situation. And native speakers' choice is usually predictable, as they depend on conventionalized forms and lexical units of varying complexity to express concepts, emotions or functions, rather than novel utterances. Of course, such preferences do not rule out linguistic creativity; yet, novelty seems to be a second choice, often with a certain purpose in mind. Advanced learners of English, or other languages, do need a command of a wide range of such prefabricated chunks of language – or formulaic language, as it is more and more often called – to be both accurate and fluent. However, it is easier said than done, and beneficial as it undoubtedly is for foreign language learning, its use may not always work in favour of non-native speakers.

Formulaicity in Native Language

Being a native speaker of a given language, we can convey any message in multiple ways. Our ability to produce numerous versions is credited to the generative potential of our grammar. Yet, we do not exercise this ability to the fullest. What is more, a great number of possible utterances seem not to be appropriate, even though there is nothing wrong with grammatical structures and vocabulary selection.