Phraseology and Culture in English

Focus on particular lexemes 

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Reasonably well: Natural Semantic Metalanguage 
as a tool for the study of phraseology and its 
cultural underpinnings 
Anna Wierzbicka 
1. Introduction 
Every society has certain evaluative words that provide a frame of orienta-
tion in daily life and guide people’s judgment and behaviour. Sometimes 
speakers are conscious of some of these words and regard them as a badge 
of belonging. Sometimes, however, a “guiding word” is so ingrained in the 
thinking of the speech community that it is not perceived as distinctive, but 
rather taken for granted like the air that people breathe. A striking example 
of a powerful and yet relatively hidden guiding word is the English adjec-
tive reasonable. The fact that this word has seldom been the focus of spe-
cial attention and reflection may have contributed to its enduring power. 
But it is not only individual words which may guide unconscious as-
sumptions and evaluations. Commonly used collocations are equally impor-
tant. As Michael Stubbs (Stubbs 2001: 3) says in his valuable recent book 
Words and Phrases (to which I will return later), “our knowledge of a lan-
guage is not only a knowledge of individual words, but of their predictable 
combinations, and of the cultural knowledge which these combinations often 
encapsulate”. This applies, particularly, to guiding words like reasonable in 
modern English; often the power of individual words goes hand in hand 
with the power of collocations including those words. In the case of rea-
sonable, it is enough to mention everyday phrases like within reasonable 
limits, a reasonable amount, a reasonable time, a reasonable price, a rea-
sonable offer, or important legal concepts like reasonable force, reasonable
care, and beyond reasonable doubt (cf. Wierzbicka 2003a). 
In the case of the adverb reasonably, which is also very important in 
Anglo-English discourse, by far the most important collocations are rea-
sonably good and reasonably well; and judging by their relative frequen-
cies, the latter is even more important than the former. For example, in the 
COBUILD corpus (56 million words from the Bank of English), we find 
113 examples of reasonably well, as compared with 42 of reasonably good.

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Anna Wierzbicka 
The words reasonable and reasonably and the collocations based on 
them carry with them a framework of evaluation which plays an important