Phraseology and Culture in English

Fixed expressions as manifestations of
cultural conceptualizations: Examples
from African varieties of English 
Hans-Georg Wolf and Frank Polzenhagen 
1. Introduction 
In rough terms, in the debate on post-colonial English one finds two oppos-
ing poles.
1
Writers on one end hold English to be irreconcilably alien and 
destructive to the indigenous cultures of its second language (L2) speakers. 
In this “cultural alienationist” (cf. Schmied 1991: 104) or “exploitation” 
model (cf. Mair 2002), the view of English as a mono-cultural culprit is 
propagated. Different theoretical orientations unite in the belief that English 
is isomorphic with Western culture and is inextricably tied to Western be-
liefs and values. From this perspective, those who adopt English in other 
parts of the world will adopt the beliefs and values of the West as well. 
Authors on the other end hold a more favorable attitude towards the 
global role of English and acknowledge the creative processes which Eng-
lish has undergone and is undergoing in different cultural settings. The 
terms New Englishes or World Englishes themselves attest to these changes 
and reflect the pluricentricity of English in the world. We espouse this posi-
tion. However, we feel that sociolinguists have had difficulties coming
to terms with “culture”, and their examples of acculturation have rarely 
gone beyond the description of some grammatical patterns, loan words, and 
phonetic features induced by mother tongue interference or endonormative 
processes. In our paper, we argue for the application of two methodolo- 
gies which supplement each other and can offer a systematic linguistic han-
dle on the expression of culture in L2 varieties of English: corpus linguis-
tics and cognitive linguistics (see Wolf 2004). One assumption of the latter 
is that a language or language variety reflects, by and large, the cultural 
context of the speech community it is used by (see Dirven, Wolf and Pol-
zenhagen fc.). Much of the conceptual structure underlying a particular 
variety is heavily influenced by and reflects cultural realities, and, evi-
dently, culture and belief systems differ. Thus, different languages can have 
a similar, and in turn, different varieties of one language may have an alto-

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Hans-Georg Wolf and Frank Polzenhagen
gether different conceptual base, as is the case, we argue, for some varieties 
of English. Here, corpus linguistic methods lend themselves to ensuring a 
reliable empirical basis of the cognitive analysis and to providing a com-
parative account across varieties. By way of describing linguistic expres-
sions of the community model in African varieties of English, we hope to 
show that at least these varieties have indeed undergone a marked accul-
turation process. 
This paper is structured as follows. First, we will introduce the socio-
cultural background of the cultural model in question, drawing from an-
thropological, political and theological studies. The main part of this paper 
is devoted to the analysis of some linguistic evidence for this model, as it is 
realized in African English (AE). This part will be divided into a) a cogni-
tive-linguistic analysis of the conceptual structure of the model, and b) a 
corpus-based analysis, which elicits keywords and multi-word units. The 
authentic text examples we provide come from a variety of sources, in par-
ticular from computer corpora. Here, we used the Corpus of English in Cam-
eroon (CEC)
2
and, as native-English reference corpora, FLOB and FROWN, 
which represent British English and American English, respectively. Many 
of the African English examples stem from a thematic text compilation 
(WCL),
3
which was compiled by one of the authors.