Formulaic language : The case of How about you?

Abstract

This paper investigates the formulaic English expression How about you? （and its variants And you? and What about you?） in the context of Japanese learners of English as a foreign language. These expressions are very familiar to Japanese EFL students and are used very frequently by Japanese learners of English. The study examined the expression as found in classroom data, corpora, recordings of native English speaker interactions and Japanese EFL textbooks. This data indicated that the learners tend to overuse the expression in their speaking, compared to native English speakers, and also use it solely as a stand-alone expression at the end of a turn to nominate the next speaker and to index a question that was asked previously. In contrast, in native English speaker interactions, the expression is often accompanied by an address term and also may be followed by a question （either a reprise of an earlier question, or a newly introduced question） and seems to be used when there are more than two participants in the interaction to allocate turns when uncertainty may occur and thus its use contributes to progressivity. It is suggested that apart from relative overuse by the learners, the deployment of this expression in minimized form in dyadic interactions impedes progressivity as it prevents a recipient of the question from building on the content of the previous turn with assessments, commentary or the like, and instead directs the next nominated speaker to give their own response to a question and in effect disattend to the contents of the prior turn. The overuse is therefore not only a question of frequency, but also of unintended pragmatic effects.