摘要：This study raises the question of whether formulaic expressions always consist of at least two words. It is argued that pragmatics should also consider paraverbal graphematical signs. Some present German expressions are emphased in quotation marks for political and possibly critical reasons (e. g. „Drittes Reich“, „zivilisiert“). They form their own kind of formulaicity, because it is not quotation. The identification of quotations is only one function of quotation marks. Other meta-pragmatic functions of quotation marks are – if at all – only contextual and often not distinct. This includes, for example, the so-called „application with reservation“ and the „term with reservation“, as examples from the German colonial period show (e. g. „wild“, „dunkler Welttheil“). For this reason, corpus-based analyses of these formulaic expressions will also require contextual interpretations in the future.
