Formulaic sequences are more or less fixed word combinations such as idioms, collocations, lexical bundles, phrasal verbs and so on. Study in this area has grown over the past fifteen years, despite the fact that there are no academic journals or conferences devoted to this topic.

This edited collection is an attempt to draw together the diverse international work on formulaic language. It features an introduction by Dr. Regina Weinert, a pioneer and expert in the study of formulaic language in acquisition. The authors have an international scope, from China and Italy to Armenia, Canada and Britain. The book is divided into three sections: Formulaic Language in Acquisition and Pedagogy; Identification and Psycholinguistic Processing of Formulaic Language; Communicative Functions of Formulaic Language. The topics of the papers are as varied as the geographic locations of the authors – critical discourse analysis, psycholinguistics, memorization, corpus analysis, specific languages such as Arabic, and even Beowulf and blogging language. This volume represents a step forward for the study of formulaic language, offering diverse, often previously unexplored perspectives from international researchers, advancing knowledge in innovative ways.

It makes a fresh contribution the growing number of works on this topic and will appeal to researchers and academics working with formulaic language throughout linguistics.

"The new millennium has seen an explosion of usage-based studies showing that formulaic language and constructions are the rule rather than the exception. This volume is an important contribution to this growing field of research, directing the reader, as it does, to an abundance of new prefabricated patterns and sequences of different degrees of generality, from abstract schemas over frames to (semi)fixed sequences, and in a wide range of applicational studies including memorization and processing, developmental L2 learning and textbook design." Britt Erman, Associate Professor, University of Stockholm, Sweden