ABSTRACT
The study of formulaic language has come a long way from the intensive study of collocations and collocates by Firth to the automatic identification of frequent formulaic expressions in language corpora. The research methodologies for language corpora collection and the development of computer software specially designed for language analysis and to identify language use in corpora brought about core changes in the study of recurrent formulaic expressions. The identification and the analysis of this type of expressions based on the study of a corpus of texts have undoubtedly become the focus of innumerable publications in the past 20 years. These studies of formulaic language had their origin in English but later spread to other languages, 284particularly Spanish. Many recent studies of formulaic language in Spanish have focused on the analysis of language corpora. These investigations are based on important pre-existing studies that have classified and illustrated the different types of formulaic language that can be found in Spanish and that were conducted before corpus-based methodologies appeared. This chapter presents a synthesis of relevant general literature on formulaic language as a springboard to develop a review of studies of formulaic language in Spanish corpora.
