Formulaicity is pervasive in both spoken and written language. Speakers use a huge amount of prefabricated language including collocations, idioms, fixed and semi-fixed expressions, and verbal creativity often involves combining established word sequences rather than inventing wholly new ones. In literature, formulaicity was long disparaged as the opposite of creativity, and a hallmark of 'genre fiction' of questionable aesthetic value, but a more recent approach sees all writing as intertextual - a tissue of citations and creative reworkings of other texts. The chapters in this book...