‘Arm’s length’ phraseology?

In the last decades, the study of phraseology within general and specialized lexicographic resources has been of interest to scholars. However, phraseology has not been studied in language for specific purposes (LSP) as much as in language for general purposes (LGP). Therefore, this study (i) offers an overview of the definitions regarding LSP phraseology, (ii) provides a series of linguistic analyses of specialized phraseological units (SPUs) extracted from a specialized bilingual dictionary, and (iii) draws a comparative line between LGP and LSP phraseology. To do so, 11,086 entries were extracted to build the analysis database. This study provides 1,054 morphosyntactic and 4,369 semantic patterns, a definition and a taxonomy of SPUs based on the data analysis and revision of LGP phraseology notions, and a hybrid lexicographic indexation method for SPUs. The contributions of this paper answer the question ‘what is a SPU?’; while highlighting similarities and differences with LGP phraseology.