Formulaic language, acknowledged by various linguists for more than a century, has known new developments in recent years, concerning in particular a revised, less rigid understanding of the notion of fixedness and, at the same time, a widening of its scope of analysis towards new types of formulaicity. Following the discussion of seven basic defining characteristics of formulaic expressions as to the degree of their formulaic extension, their stability or fixedness, their idiomaticity, their pragmatic imbrication ; their lexical saturation within “constructions”, their dissemination and durability, as well as nonverbal concomitant activities, the present contribution develops a new expanded definition of formulaic expressions which are henceforth called formulaic turn-construction units.