ABSTRACT
Many grammatical structures have a stable form in all the contexts in which they occur. One of the first scholars to draw attention to this was Jespersen:
Some things in language – in any language – are of the formula character; that is to say, no one can change anything in them. A phrase like ‘How do you do?’ is entirely different from such a phrase as ‘I gave the boy a lump of sugar.’ In the former everything is fixed: you cannot even change the stress saying ‘How do you do?’ or make a pause between the words. … It is the same with ‘Good morning!,’ ‘Thank you,’ ‘Beg your pardon,’ and other similar expressions. One may indeed analyze such a formula and show that it consists of several words, but it is felt and handled as a unit, which may often mean something quite different from the meaning of the component words taken separately. (Jespersen 1968 (1924): 18)
