FORMULAIC COMPETENCE
FORMULAIC COMPETENCE

Summary/Abstract: What is formulaic language? Is formulaicity a matter of degree or a plus/ minus feature? What do foreign language learners need in order to get formulaicity right? A lot has already been said and written about it, yet no generally agreed definition seems to be available. Different researchers approach the problem from radically different angles, often using multiple terms to denote the same thing, while others use a blanket term to refer to a range of distinct phenomena. Consequently, this paper is an attempt to integrate the different perspectives on formulaicity. What emerges is a model of ‘‘formulaic competence”, which emphasises the three main dimensions of linguistic prefabrication: the formal aspect (fixedness and co-selection of elements), the psycholinguistic aspect (holistic processing) and the sociolinguistic aspect (cultural embeddedness).

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