This book is the first of the two-volume collection of papers on formulaic language. The collection is among the first ones in the field. The book draws attention to the ritualized, repetitive side of language, which to some estimates make up over 50% of spoken and written text. While in the linguistic literature, the creative and innovative aspects of language have been amply highlighted, conventionalized, pre-fabricated, “off-the-shelf” expressions have been paid less attention – an imbalance that this book attempts to remedy. The first of the two volumes addresses the very concept of formulaic language and provides studies that explore the grammatical and semantic properties of formulae, their stylistic distribution within languages, and their evolution in the course of language history. Since most of the papers are readily accessible to readers with only basic familiarity with linguistics, besides being a resource in linguistic research, the book may be used in courses on discourse structure, pragmatics, semantics, language acquisition, and syntax, as well as being a resource in linguistic research.

In this study all n-grams including the lemma hand were automatically retrieved from the British National Corpus and then formulaic sequences were manually distinguished. A special focus was given to at hand, in hand, on hand and to hand which occurred with reference to humans, animals, concrete inanimate items and abstract items. The abstract meanings were metonymic and metaphorical mappings of literal body part meanings onto more abstract meanings. The data indicate that these sequences are the result of a lexicalization process in which they are developing towards univerbation. They seem to be processed holistically without regard to the meaning of the preposition, which is supported by the fact that they are now occurring written solidly in informal registers.