Working definition of formulaic expression
The definition used here is based on Wray’s (2002: 9) definition of formulaic sequence and it is only intended to be a working definition, rather than a full and formal definition of formulaicity. In this study, a formulaic expression is an expression which:
is prefabricated,
has a non-compositional, or partly compositional meaning,
shows conventionalization,
allows a restricted exchangeability of component words,
shows a degree of fixedness in its word order.
Clearly, more research is needed in order to determine what exactly defines formulaicity beyond any fuzziness, but these five criteria, when applied together, proved useful in separating formulaic expressions from the non-formulaic expressions in the corpus to a large extent, even if they only view formulaicity from the narrow perspective of instruction manuals.