Linguistic Prefabrication

The study covers a wide range of topics, essentially attempting to model linguistic idiomaticity in Systemic Functional Grammar. It assesses how the two fundamental principles of language use, the ‘idiom principle’ and the ‘open-choice principle’, interact with each other to construct English texts. As a counterweight to the traditional structural approach to collocations and idiomatic expressions, this study investigates the ‘phraseology’ of the register of travel advertising, andexplores prefabrication and conventionalization in language use and human behavior. It seeks to answer the age-old question of whether human beings are ‘primarily like buses, which travel along regular routes’ or ‘like taxis, which move about freely’. Ritualization, as sociological and anthropological theory have long since recognized, is simply characteristic of all aspects of human behavior and its contexts.