A Closer Look at Formulaic Language: Prosodic Characteristics of Swedish Proverbs

Formulaic expressions (such as idioms, proverbs, and conversational speech formulas) are currently a topic of interest. Examination of prosody in formulaic utterances, a less explored property of formulaic expressions, has yielded controversial views. The present study investigates prosodic characteristics of proverbs, as one type of formulaic expression, including tonal patterns and rate. Seven familiar proverbs and matched control sentences were spoken as naturalistically as possible by 15 Swedish females (10 adults, 5 children). Results revealed that tonal pattern distributions were significantly different between sentence proverbs and matched control sentences, with proverbs generally showing a ‘less stress’ tonal pattern, which may be interpreted as proverb specific. Proverbs were also spoken with a significantly faster speech rate than control sentences. Children showed a significantly faster rate in proverbs known to them but showed more variability in tonal patterns. The results indicate that proverbs have distinctive prosodic characteristics when compared with newly created language. Implications for proposals of holistic storage and processing, the role of frequency of exposure, and a dual model of language are discussed.