Phraseology and Culture in English

3. Conceptual implications of linguistic dissemination across cultures 
What happens when people in a given society adopt a new language or a 
language variety? Languages implanted in new contexts should serve the 
purposes of their speakers in expressing their experience, which is very 
much entrenched in their culture and environment. Thus, speakers of a new 
language are quite likely to change the language or come up with new lin-
guistic forms and combinations that would accommodate their cultural ex-
perience. Some changes and innovations may relate to symbolizing a new 
identity that is different from that of the ‘native’ speakers of the language. 
Linguistic changes and innovations in new varieties such as vernacular-
ized varieties may surface as phonological, morpho-syntactic, or lexical fea-
tures but are largely instantiations of conceptualisations that are culturally 
constructed by the new speech community (e.g. Wolf and Simo Bobda 2001). 
These conceptualisations include schemas, categories, metaphors, blends, 
etc. that emerge at the cultural level of cognition (Sharifian 2003). Schemas 
are units of knowledge that include concepts that are associated with each 
other thematically. On the other hand, concepts associated with each other 
under a category enter into an x is a kind of y relationship. Thus, ‘food’ and 
‘restaurant’ are associated with each other schematically, but ‘pasta’ and 
‘food’ are associated with each other categorically, in that ‘pasta’ is an in-
stance of the category of ‘food’. Conceptualisations that involve some form 
of mapping from one schema or category onto another are known as ‘con-
ceptual metaphors’ and those that involve mapping from two schemas and 
categories onto a third new concept are known as “blends” (Fauconnier 1997). 
Other forms of conceptualisation include perspectivisation, or adopting a