Abstract
This pilot study investigates the formulaic phraseology most frequently used in highly formulaic political
documents by examining a self-built bilingual parallel corpus of 43 speeches delivered in United Nations Security Council (UNSC)
meetings by Chinese representatives. The study also probes corpus-based approaches to explore formulaic phraseology and
demonstrates a method to retrieve Chinese formulaic phraseology from the UNSC corpus. Formulaic phraseology is often seen in
political discourse. It can be defined as a sequence, continuous or discontinuous, of words or other meaning elements that are, or
appear to be, prefabricated, stored and retrieved whole from memory at the time of use rather than being subject to generation or
analysis by the language grammar. This study begins with a literature review of formulaic phraseology, including its features and
significance in simultaneous interpreting. It then exhibits a four-step retrieval process with the Sketch Engine software program
to acquire Chinese formulaic phraseology from the corpus to fill previous studies’ gap. Key functional units of the Sketch Engine,
including Wordlist, N-grams, and Concordance, are used to extract formulaic phraseology from the UNSC corpus. Methodological
issues involved in identifying formulaic phraseology, such as length of phraseology and quantitative criteria (frequency and
dispersion thresholds), are also discussed in the study. Three types of formulaic phraseology are identified: (1) greeting
representatives and other members and expressing appreciation; (2) expressing concerns about the topic of the meeting; (3)
expressing China’s viewpoints about the topic of the meeting. The training of interpreters would be more effective if this
categorization of formulaic phraseology is incorporated into the curriculum.
The inter-comparison of major satellite aerosol retrieval algorithms using simulated intensity and polarization characteristics of reflected light
