Phraseology and Culture in English

particular “native” species may be described as feral if found growing in 
one area of Australia to which settlers imported them from another. “Feral 
olive trees” are an exotic species which adapt readily to environmental 
conditions in South Australia, but as the collocation suggests, they are not 
always welcome. 
From this, it might be inferred that non-Indigenous Australians as a 
whole could be described as “feral”, however, this is not the case. Groups 
of humans who are referred to as “feral” in Australia include “feral chil-
dren”, “feral teenagers” and “feral activists”. These collocations, used with 
an attitude of despair and hopelessness, have dispensed with the connota-
tion that the humans so denoted were originally cultivated and are poten-
tially controllable. Is eradication really the only answer? 

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Lexical developments in greenspeaking
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Our data contain a number of collocations which use community to refer 
to various activities to do with the environment. We acknowledge the spe-
cialised scientific use of community, for example within Botany, but the 
examples from our data arise largely out of popular discourse, which de-
fines community somewhat differently. In environmental language, as in 
linguistics, the use of the word is vague. It is difficult to pin down the 
boundaries of a community; who is accountable; and who takes responsibil-
ity for the things that occur and for the things they happen to. 
{(adj)
+ N} + COMMUNITY 
broader community 
professional development community 
healthy community 
rural farming community 
livable community 
struggling community 
local community 
wider community 
medical community 
Like feral, community may be applied to fauna, flora and humans, but in our 
data, the use of community is restricted to describing groups of humans. 
2.5. Catch-phrases 
Proponents of environmentalism have created a number of catch-phrases 
which summarize its key philosophies, concerns and sentiments. Such catch-
phrases may originate from political platforms and environmental organisa-
tions. They often start off as slogans chanted at activist rallies, parts of for-
mal campaign speeches and publicity, or emblazoned on posters, stickers 
and buttons. 
“Think globally, act locally” is one of the best-known environmental 
catch-phrases, used to encourage humans to change their habits in order to 
do less damage to the environment. It can be seen that following the princi-
ple of Zipf’s Law, the meaning of this rather long catch-phrase has been 
retained, and is encapsulated within shorter slogans such as the now com-
mon “global village”. 
In terms of consumer habit formation, another phrase which is now fre-
quently trotted out by retailers is “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle”, as referred to 
above. In the discourse about energy and fossil fuels an oft-touted lexical 
phrase revolves around the need to “reduce greenhouse emissions”. The use 
of reduce in this phrase echoes the threefold slogan above. This catch-phrase 

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Melina Magdalena and Peter Mühlhäusler 
is used both by proponents of alternative renewable energies, and by pro-
moters of fossil fuel consumption. 
Specific catch-phrases can serve as a basis for the formation of more lo-
cally-bound catch-phrases. “Save the whales”, for example, has many vari-
ants. Some are very general, such as “save the earth”, but others are more 
specific and localised, such as “Save the Patawalonga”. Catch-phrases built 
around “Save the –” are emotive, indicating not only an urgency, but again, 
the capacity of humans to alter circumstances for the better. 
2.5.1. Pronouns 
The degree to which speakers identify with and feel involved in the fate of 
what they are trying to save is indicated in the frequent use of the pronoun 
our, instead of the more generic the. Our data further suggest a slight trend 
to the choice of whether to use our in this set of catch-phrases, as shown in 
the table below. It almost seems as though this choice reflects a feeling 
about whether the general fate of humans is bound up with the fate of the 
subject under appeal. Perhaps human survival would be less impacted upon 
if koalas and whales disappeared, but we can hardly get by without “our 
climate”.