| In recent years, there is increasing interest in the study of phraseology. Formulaic sequences, as one type of phraseolgocial units, have also gained more and more attention. As yet, however, previous studies of phraseology are largely monolingual in nature and little investigation has been conducted on a bilingual basis. In light of Sinclair's idiom principle and his corpus-driven approach to identifying functionally equivalent units, the present paper attempts to identify the English equivalents of formulaic sequences in Chinese political texts by using one parallel corpus and two comparable corpora.The present study first proceeds from a monolingual perspective, and charts the formal and functional features of formulaic sequences in Chinese political texts in detail. Formulaic sequences in Chinese political texts are treated within four main structural categories: nominals, binomials, modifier+noun sequences, and ADV+V sequences, within which discoursal functions are categorized and examined. Then the corpus investigation is carried out from a contrastive perspective. Under the framework of the extended units of meaning, a number of English equivalents of formulaic sequences in Chinese political texts are identified.This study shows that Chinese political texts contain a large number of formulaic sequences that have regular formal features and perform specific functions in texts. Also, there is identifiable bilingual correspondence between formulaic sequences in Chinese and English. However, such correspondence is constrained by (1) the semantic area of the whole FSs, (2) the semantic area of shorter lexical sequences in the FSs, (3) the co-selected collocates of the FSs, and (4) the textual environment of the FSs. In addition, we have found that the idiom principle not only works in English, but also works across languages. The results of the present study are expected to shed light on translation, foreign language pedagogy, as well as bilingual lexicography.
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