Phraseology and the Entrenchment-and-Conventionalization Model

Abstract Over the past decades, the scope of phraseology has been widened, making the targets of phraseological research more and more heterogeneous. Researchers in the field have embraced cognitive and pragmatic aspects that were not in the focus in the past. Boundaries to grammar and the study of discourse have been blurred. This expansion offers the opportunity to develop new approaches to phraseological research which have the potential to connect it more closely with the core linguistic disciplines. In this paper I first recap the nature of the recent change and identify formulaicity as the main uniting characteristic of the phraseological field as it is conceived of today. Then I identify some questions that have to be addressed by a theoretically grounded conception of phraseology. I suggest that the Entrenchment-and-Conventionalization Model may serve as a unified framework which promises to integrate phraseological units and co-occurrence tendencies as ordinary components of the overall architecture of language. I derive several hypotheses from the model which may serve as inspirations for future research in phraseology.