The Relationship between the Length and Frequency among English Multiword Formulaic Sequences

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The present paper employs a synergetic approach to exploring the relationship between the length and frequency among English multiword formulaic sequences. A corpus-driven approach is adopted to acquire sufficient data. Results show partial applicability with whole structure and complete meaning. However, the majority of formulaic sequences, lexical bundles, are proved to be an exception to the conventional Zipf ’s assumption of inverse relationship between word length and word frequency. This study verifies and extends the effective range of Zipf ’s assumption and the synergetic model on word length and word frequency to a longer units of language units: the length of a sequence of words with a whole structure and complete meaning. It also discovers a distinctive feature of lexical bundles and provides insights into the length– frequency relationship among lexical bundles through synergetic analysis. Besides, this study also includes register differences and offers a new perspective to register analysis. It concludes that the synergetic system of length and frequency among lexical bundles is operated under the compromise between the requirements of minimization of production efforts and the requirements of maximization of information.

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