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In recent research considerable interest has been shown in strings of linguistic items which appear to behave, in certain respects, as single items, and which are referred to in this paper as multi-word sequences. The aim of the paper is to investigate the interface between work on such phenomena and recent developments in the theory of Functional Grammar. A selective review of corpus-based approaches to multi-word sequences is followed by a brief introduction to Wray's psycholinguistically-oriented model of formulaicity. A corpus example is then discussed in some detail. The discussion up to this point is then related to four recent models within the overall framework of Functional Grammar which aim to increase the level of psychological adequacy of the theory: Nuyts' Functional Procedural Grammar, Hengeveld's Functional Discourse Grammar, Mackenzie's Incremental Functional Grammar and Bakker and Siewierska's expression rule model. Brief comments are also made on multi-word sequences in relation to production vs. comprehension and on the relationship between formulaicity and levels of structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When a speaker makes an utterance that comments on herself, she is doing more than simply making a reflective statement about herself. She is drawing attention to a part of her self that she deems relevant to the current exchange by objectifying that part of her self. As it happens, meta-discoursal self-evaluative statements are often made by a speaker about what she has just said or is about to say in the ongoing discourse. Based on a model that sees the self as a conglomeration of all the narratives constituting a person’s experiences, and in all of which the person occupies the role of the protagonist, this paper investigates three meta-discoursal constructions which refer to facets of the self, and their pragma-semantic function of distancing in discourse. These are the ‘my N V-ing’, the ‘N in me’, and the ‘N in me V’ constructions, as exemplified respectively by That was my arrogance speaking, That’s the purist in me talking, and The cynic in me would say yes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]