Phraseology and Culture in English

3. How many meanings does 
reasonably have, and how are they 
mutually related? 
According to the Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary, the word 
reasonably has two meanings, which are defined and illustrated as follows: 
1.
Reasonably means to quite a good or great degree, e.g. I’m rea-
sonably broad across the shoulders… 
2. 
If someone behaves reasonably, they behave sensibly and fairly. 
E.g. ‘Well, you can’t do that now’, I said reasonably. 
The collocation reasonably well is not mentioned in that dictionary at all, 
presumably because it was seen as an instance of the first meaning: ‘to 
quite a good or great degree’. 
According to the COBUILD, then, the different meanings of reasonably
are not related to one another at all (there is no overlap between the two 
definitions). As I will try to show below, such an analysis misses the link 
between the different uses of reasonably – a link which is a key to the cul-
tural significance of the collocation reasonably well.
It is also striking how inadequate the two definitions are, even regard-
less of the fact that they blur the link between the two meanings. To begin 
with the second meaning, reasonably is defined here via fair (as is also the 
adjective reasonable), whereas fair is defined in the same dictionary via 
reasonable: “Something that is fair is reasonable according to a generally 
accepted standard or idea about what is right and just.” Obviously, a vi-
cious circle (cf. Wierzbicka 1996: Chapter 9). 

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Reasonably well
53
As for the first meaning assigned to reasonably, it is clear that it is not 
supported by substitution in context. For example, “I’m reasonably broad 
across the shoulders” does not mean that ‘I’m broad across the shoulders to 
a great degree’; and “I’m reasonably good at writing” does not mean that 
‘I’m good at writing to a great degree’. It hardly needs to be added that “all 
went reasonably well” does not mean ‘all went well to a great (or good) 
degree’. (Apart from anything else, none of the sentences resulting from 
such substitutions is felicitous in English.) 
What does need to be added at this point is that while the meaning rea-
sonably in reasonably broad is related to that of reasonably in reasonably
well, the two are not identical: in reasonably broad, reasonably itself im-
plies something positive (and applies to a degree of broadness as well as the 
degree of “goodness”), whereas in reasonably well a positive evaluation is 
expressed by well (and applies only to the degree of “goodness”). I will 
return to this point later. 
The COBUILD dictionary is of course right in affirming that the mean-
ing of reasonably in behaves reasonably is different from that in reasona-
bly broad – an affirmation which can be supported with reference to the use 
of the word unreasonably: a person can be said to behave unreasonably but 
not to have unreasonably broad shoulders. But we still need to ask what 
exactly these different meanings of reasonably are, how many meanings 
there are, and how they are mutually related. The question about the mean-
ing, and significance, of the collocation reasonably well has to be consid-
ered in that wider semantic context. 
Incidentally, since I have distinguished earlier, for the sake of clarity, an 
ad-verbal and an ad-adjectival use of reasonably, it is interesting to note 
that unreasonably can be combined with both verbs and adjectives, but that 
nonetheless it appears to have only one meaning. To illustrate (from 
COBUILD):
During the course of their marriage, she became unreasonably obsessed 
about matrimonial obligations, worrying, for instance, that she had failed 
him because she had not already given him a son. 
Paul had submitted himself to the “apostolic authority” of the Council, and 
not unreasonably expected others to do the same. 
I got unreasonably angry with John sometimes. 
In a variation of this defense, when they confront scientific evidence that 
healing can be done by ordinary individuals, they may erect unreasonably
strict criteria in order to prove to themselves that healing is, after all, impos-
sible for average folk. 

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54
Anna Wierzbicka 
Thus, one can be unreasonably angry or unreasonably obsessed, but not 
reasonably angry or reasonably obsessed. Or if one can be reasonably
angry, this would not be the same sense of reasonably which has its oppo-
site in unreasonably. For reasonably, therefore, the distinction between ad-
verbal and ad-adjectival usage does appear to be useful as a guide to distin-
guish meanings. Nonetheless, it can of course be only a first step in an at-
tempt to sort out and identify the different meanings of reasonably.
In this paper, I want to argue, above all, that the collocation reasonably
well is culturally extremely revealing and that it promotes (as well as re-
flects) certain assumptions and values which are central to Anglo culture. 
At the same time, I will argue that here as elsewhere, insightful cultural 
analysis depends on rigorous semantic analysis; and that rigorous semantic 
analysis depends in turn on the availability of an adequate semantic frame-
work.
As colleagues and I have argued for decades, such an adequate semantic 
framework is available in the “NSM” theory of meaning. The Natural Se-
mantic Metalanguage (NSM), which is this theory’s basic tool, allows us, 
inter alia, to decompose all the meanings of reasonably (and reasonable) in 
terms of a well-established set of indefinables and thus in a way free from 
any overt or covert circularity; and it allows us to show how these meanings 
are mutually related. Once we have revealed the links between these differ-
ent meanings, we can appreciate the cultural underpinnings of the colloca-
tion reasonably well and its significance as a tool for transmitting certain 
key cultural assumptions.