Phrasal template

A phrasal template is a phrase-long collocation that contains one or several empty slots which may be filled by words to produce individual phrases.

Description

A phrasal template is a phrase-long collocation that contains one or several empty slots which may be filled by words to produce individual phrases. Often there are some restrictions on the grammatic category of the words allowed to fill particular slots. Phrasal templates are akin to forms, in which blanks are to be filled with appropriate data. The term phrasal template first appeared in a linguistic study of prosody in 1983^[1] but doesn't appear to have come into common use until the late 1990s.^[2] An example is the phrase "common stocks rose <Number> to <Number>", e.g., "common stocks rose 1.72 to 340.36".^[3]

The neologism "snowclone" was introduced to refer to a special case of phrasal templates that "clone" popular clichés. For example, a misquotation of Diana Vreeland's "Pink is the navy blue of India"^[4] may have given rise to the template "<color> is the new black", which in turn evolved into "<X> is the new <Y>".^{[citation needed]}

Use

• The word game Mad Libs makes use of phrasal templates.
• The notion is used in natural language processing systems^[5] and in natural language generation, such as in application-oriented report generators.^[6][7]

See also

• Backus–Naur form
• Computational humor – usage of phrasal templates for generation of jokes by computer
• Joke cycle
• Phrase structure rules
• Phraseme
• Snowclone
• The king is dead, long live the king!

References

1. Cutler, Anne; Ladd, D. Robert; Brown, Gillian (1983-01-01). Prosody: models and measurements. Springer-Verlag. ISBN 9783540124283.
2. Meeting, Association for Computational Linguistics (1997-01-01). Proceedings of the Conference. Association for Computational Linguistics.
3. Susan Armstrong (1994) Using Large Corpora, ISBN 0-262-51082-0, p. 149
4. ON THE TRAIL OF "THE NEW BLACK" (AND "THE NAVY BLUE"), Language Log, December 28, 2006
5. Becker, Joseph D. (1975). "The phrasal lexicon". Proceedings of the 1975 workshop on Theoretical issues in natural language processing - TINLAP '75. p. 60. doi:10.3115/980190.980212. S2CID 3919430.
6. Kukich, Karen (1983). Knowledge-based report generation: a knowledge-engineering approach to natural language report generation. OCLC 12074611.^{[page needed]}
7. Bourbeau, L.; Carcagno, D.; Goldberg, E.; Kittredge, R.; Polguère, A. (1990). "Bilingual generation of weather forecasts in an operations environment". Proceedings of the 13th conference on Computational linguistics -. Vol. 1. pp. 90–92. doi:10.3115/992507.992527. ISBN 9529020287. S2CID 52871604.