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While most linguists accept that there is such a thing as formulaic language, consensus about what it is exactly is severely limited. Underpinning the notion of formulaic language is the sense that certain words have an especially strong relationship with each other in creating their meaning – usually because only that particular combination, and not synonyms, can be used. For example, if something is beyond consideration we might say it is ‘out of the question’ but we cannot rephrase the description as ‘*external to the query’. Theories differ considerably regarding what it means that some words have a particular bond with others. Some accounts, including the one in this book, envision the string of words to have its own separate identity as an entry in the mental lexicon. Others focus on how we might create ‘rat runs’ in our processing, so that certain formulations are quicker and easier to produce than others with the same meaning. Others still are interested in identifying rules and constraints on them that will generate the formulaic expression. These different theories draw the line between what is formulaic and what is not formulaic in different places.

At the uncontentious end are what are often termed the ‘true’ idioms – a set of not all that frequent but particularly evocative multiword strings that express an idea metaphorically, such as ‘kick the bucket’, ‘red herring’, and ‘raining cats and dogs’. It is rare for a theory of language not to give such expressions a special status that pairs the wordstring with a holistic meaning, though even here attempts can be made to see whether parts of the meaning can be mapped onto parts of the form (see ‘What goes into the lexicon’, below). At the highly contentious other end are collocational associations such as, in academic prose, ‘fully developed’ and ‘highly complex’ (Biber, Johansson, Leech, and Conrad 1999: 565). Here, it is not that people doubt that the attraction between the words is particularly strong, but that theories differ as to how one best accounts for that attraction.

Between the two extremes come other types, including expressions that seem entirely detached from normal meanings and/or do not reflect the normal rules of grammar, for example, ‘by and large’, ‘come a cropper’; expressions that are metaphorical but, arguably, are less distant from the literal meaning than idioms, such as ‘set one’s store by’, ‘take stock’, ‘watch one’s back’, ‘take it’s/their toll’; expressions in which one or more words have a peculiar meaning, such as ‘do someone in’; a wide set of idiomatic turns of phrase, such as ‘do let’s v’; ‘you’d better v’; ‘not very well’ (in the sense of ‘ill’); and – central to some theoretical models but excluded from others – ’partly-fixed frames’ or ‘constructions’, complete phrases or clauses partly realized with specific lexical material and partly left open for interchangeable items, for example, ‘the end of the N’; ‘as a result of NP’; ‘the way in which CLAUSE’. These frames are often viewed as carrying their own meaning and pragmatics.

Interacting with the models of language patterning and use are certain assumptions about the ‘word’ as the fundamental building block of language – the implications of this view are explored in Chapter 5. Seeing the single word as a consistent unit of language, and thus viewing a two-word string as two units joined by a grammatical rule, gives a special status to what, in some cases, is a rather arbitrary result of historical practices. Why, for instance, is ‘out of two units when ‘into’ is one? Some words, including ‘into’ and also ‘although’ and ‘cupboard’, evidently used to be two words, and it is easy, in retrospect, to imagine that they probably had some properties associated with a single word before they actually became united into one in writing. But unless a pair of words is being written in different ways, a sign of transition (for example, ‘in(-)depth’, ‘what’s( )more’, ‘as( )well’, and ‘a() lot’, see Wray 1996), it will obviously be difficult to tell whether any given string of two or more separate words does have the properties associated with formulaicity or not (see Chapter 8).

While some accounts of formulaic language conservatively only attribute formulaicity to material that already displays the tell-tale signs of it – written as a single word or at least hyphenated, pronounced differently as a whole than as a sequence of component parts, or having a meaning that cannot be easily derived from those parts – other models, including the one used in this book, propose that items become formulaic first, and only later begin to develop the tell-tale signs. The implications of this orientation are immense both for the claims one might make about how much of our language is formulaic, and for how we might identify it – for there could be a huge quantity of formulaic material that does not carry any outward sign of being so. Indeed, any string of words might turn out to be formulaic, and it might take a century or more for that fact to become fully evident.

The situation is exacerbated by the need to distinguish between something that is formulaic ‘in the language’, so to speak, and something that is formulaic for just a particular individual or group; and also to distinguish between what is formulaic for a given speaker and for a given hearer. The notion that the language itself contains formulaic material is inevitable in corpus-driven accounts, where one examines large quantities of text without particular attention to who produced it, and looks for recurrences. If one finds more than a certain number of instances of a particular sequence of words, it is possible to attribute that pattern to ‘the language’.

However, within a psycholinguistically driven account there is less value in attributing formulaicity to strings in ‘the language’, for formulaicity is viewed as the property of a particular string as it is handled by a particular individual. What is formulaic for one person need not be formulaic for another – the reason will become clear as the three claims are discussed below. So a given speaker might produce a word string formulaically, only to have it treated as non-formulaic by the hearer. On the other hand, even an account based on the individual’s knowledge will recognize that many word strings are likely to be formulaic for most native speakers – that is what it means to know the same language.