Phraseology and Culture in English

Possessive
In Aboriginal English, a possessive relationship may be shown by juxta-
position, so that my cousin bike means ‘the bike belonging to my cousin’ 
(Eagleson, Kaldor and Malcolm 1982: 85). This process results in multi-
word units such as the following: 
my mum mum ‘my maternal grandmother’ 
Marky boy ‘Mark’s son’. 
Coordinative
Coordinative compounds are those where “the component bases are of 
equal status” (Bauer and Huddleston 2002: 1646). An example of this is
cousin brother ‘a cousin who, according to Indigenous kinship relation-
ships, is a brother.’ 
Lexicalizing
Some compound nouns are paired items which, for expressive effect, 
have been lexicalised, as in: 
man head 
‘precocious little boy’ and 
woman head ‘precocious little girl,’ 
which are expressions which may be used to give credit to a child for the 
knowledge they possess, especially cultural knowledge, as in e’s a 
proper man head, that one.
Another example is the metaphorical expression foot Falcon, which may 
be compared to the more longstanding English idiom shanks’s pony as an 
expression of having no transport other than one’s own legs. This nomi-
nal expression may be converted to a verb phrase, as in Let’s footfalcon.
Falcon/falcon in this case refers to a model of a Ford sedan.
Dephrasal
Dephrasal compounds result from fusion of elements into a single lexical 
base, rather than from the compounding of nouns in the normal sense 
(Bauer and Huddleston 2002: 1646). An example of a dephrasal com-
pound is the use of racehorse to refer, metaphorically, to an athletic per-
son. The expression derives from the word for the reptile karda (in Nyun-
gar), which, in English is rendered ‘racehorse goanna.’ 

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Ian G. Malcolm and Farzad Sharifian