Phraseology and Culture in English

8. Conclusion 
Issues of mobility have always been important for our culture. Mobility can 
be a drab necessity, but also a free time pleasure. On the basis of diachronic 
linguistic data we can observe shifts in cultural practices; from travelling as 
a privilege for the aristocracy and the rich to holidays as seasonal move-
ments of the masses, to globalisation and travelling as a prerequisite to 
professional success. 
We can also observe at each historical stage which role the different 
forms of mobility take in the value systems of a culture. The tourism indus-
try is one of our economic as well as socio-culturally structuring pillars. 
Everyone is concerned about and has an opinion on what it takes to be a 

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The phraseology of tourism 
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tourist, a traveller or a package holiday-maker. We can document an inter-
textual net where uses of the respective expressions are tightly linked. They 
derive their meaning partly from delimitation from their neighbouring con-
cepts. Each choice, therefore, makes the differences in meaning clear; be it 
differences in personalities, social status, education, income or interests of 
the social actors. 
Of course there can be no direct link presupposed between language 
use, cognition and culture. The point made here, however, is that fre-
quently used linguistic routines in a particular area of meaning are as 
inseparably linked to the cognitive schemata the language users have 
formed about something, as to institutionalised cultural facts. There are 
always alternative ways of expression. Nevertheless, if particular forms 
are chosen habitually, this points to a cognitive preference. A cultural 
basis for such frequent, shared preferences seems plausible. As Giddens 
(1991) states, our knowledge and experience is gained and transmitted 
through a linguistically mediated process of socialisation. This leads us 
back to Halliday’s previously mentioned concept of duality, which ex-
plains the dialectics of socio-cultural structure and individual and cultur-
ally agreed on agency. 
Storey (2003) argues that activities and structures of popular culture are 
one of the principal sites where divisions such as social class are estab-
lished and contested. Capitalist culture industries try to impose forms of 
culture which are taken up as well as opposed by the consumers. What 
develops is a “compromise equilibrium” (Gramsci 1971: 161) between the 
two; a mix of forces from both the commercial and consumer side, each 
with their own form of power, i.e. offer and demand, leading to a basically 
stable socio-cultural situation. 
The analyses presented can form one module of a possible ethnographic 
study to discover the meanings people (partly linguistically) construe, 
which circulate and become embedded in people’s daily experienced sur-
rounding. The presented methodology can not only document the repertoire 
of products and services offered by industry, but also how people select, 
appropriate, and use these commodities, transforming them into shared
cultural practices (Storey 2003). 
Corpus linguistics has the possibility of documenting this relationship 
from the language side. As Allen (2000: 37) puts it: “Meaning … is always 
at one and the same time ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the text”. The textual basis, 
however, is the common stock from which we all draw, which is analysable 
and therefore accessible. 

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Andrea Gerbig and Angela Shek 
Notes
1. Words in upper case stand for the different word forms of the lemma. Word 
forms / collocations quoted from the corpus data are in italics. Sets of collocates 
are given in diamond brackets. 
2. Sweet (1989) describes case studies of “natives” (Navajo Indians) playing at 
being “tourists”, in order to revert existing hierarchies. The tourists’ ignorance 
of and superficial enthusiasm for “authentic” rituals of the “natives” is drama-
tised. 
3.
Norm is taken here in terms of overall frequency and distribution of forms of 
language use, as described in very large, balanced (representative) corpora. 
4. A few examples of the (not easily distinguishable) terminological multiplicity 
are the following: Bolinger (1976): “prefabricated chunks”; Pawley and Syder 
(1983): “lexical items”; Cowie (1988): “composites” or “formulae”; Nattinger and 
DeCarrico (1992): “lexical phrases” or “conventionalised form / function com-
posites”; Moon (1998): “idiom schemas”; Erman and Warren (2000): “prefabs”. 
5. Teliya et al. (1998) go as far as calling phraseology “a language of culture”, 
representing culture’s “collective mentality”. 
6. As Sinclair (1998: 20) stresses, a discourse prosody “is a subtle element of 
attitudinal, often pragmatic meaning and there is often no word in the lan-
guage that can be used as a descriptive label for it. What is more, its role is of-
ten so clear in determining the occurrence of the item that the prosody is, 
paradoxically, not necessarily realised at all.” 
7. “Although Thomas Cook had started the package tour to enable the masses to 
travel, it was still beyond the reach of most people’s pockets” (BNC). 
8. These items in brackets paraphrase semantically related elements and provide 
content summaries. 
9. WTO = World Tourist Association, WTTC = World Travel and Tourism Coun-
cil, ABTANTB = Association of British Travel Agents National Training Board. 
10. The importance of a “mini-break” is most impressively parodied in Helen Field-
ing’s The Diary of Bridget Jones. Bridget invests considerable effort in per-
suading her flashy new boyfriend to take her to a stylish resort for the week-
end. She takes this event as visible proof of their relationship, to be shown off 
to friends and family. 
11. See also Veblen (1973) who emphasises such aspects of conspicuous con-
sumption within the “leisure class”.