Phraseology and Culture in English

party in Nyongo, the person that is being sold goes to work in the spiritual 
world for the person that sold him/her. (WCL, from Cameroon) 
WEALTH 
/
SUCCESS IS A SIGN OF WITCHCRAFT 
underlies the belief that per-
sons who are materially successful are thought of as having spiritually sold 
or eaten their relatives (also see the illustrations of the 
EXPLOITATION IS 
WITCHCRAFT
conceptualization above). Therefore, individuals and entire 
groups may avoid the ostentatious display of material success, lest they be 
accused of witchcraft. 
In this section, we gave a broad overview of salient and interrelated 
conceptualizations within the African community model. In the following 
section, we provide a more systematic account of some conceptualizations 
identified so far, in terms of conceptual networks. 
3.2. Culture-specific conceptual networks 
Throughout the discussion in the previous section, we observed the omni-
presence of eating metaphors in the domains of political leadership, witch-
craft and wealth. Given their salience, we focus on these particular con-
ceptualizations. Some general considerations on eating metaphors should be 
made first. Resources, food, and the related concepts of hunger and eating 
as source domains for metaphoric conceptualizations are definitely not spe-
cific to the African context. Rather, there is a whole set of eating metaphors 
which may be termed “general” (see Grady 1999 for a related notion) and 

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Fixed expressions as manifestations of cultural conceptualizations
409
which are observable cross-culturally and cross-linguistically. For our pre-
sent concern, the following general eating metaphors may be identified (cf. 
Lakoff 1993 online):
ʊ
all sorts of drives are conceptualized as 
HUNGER
, yielding 
STRONG
DESIRES ARE HUNGER
ʊ
resources are conceptualized as 
FOOD
, yielding 
RESOURCES ARE FOOD
ʊ
achieving is conceptualized as 
EATING
, yielding 
ACHIEVING A PURPOSE 
IS EATING
ʊ
being important and having achieved is conceptualized as 
BEING BIG
as 
the result of 
EATING
, yielding 
IMPORTANT IS BIG 
10
Depending on the cultural context, these metaphors may occur in isola-
tion or as an entire metaphoric network. It is in order to illustrate these 
notions before applying them to our immediate object of study. Consider 
the well-known and well-documented case of eating metaphors in the in-
formation and ideas domain. Inter alia, the following metaphors have been 
observed:
11
IDEAS ARE FOOD
That class gave me food for thought. 
That’s a very meaty book. 
WANTING TO KNOW IS HUNGER 
/
THIRST
He has an appetite for learning / thirst for knowledge. 
She has an insatiable curiosity. 
AQUIRING KNOWLEDGE IS EATING 
/
DIGESTING
and
GIVING INFORMATION IS FEEDING
She devoured the book. 
The teacher spoon-fed them the material. 
This lecture was hard to digest. 
HAVING KNOWLEGE 
/
IDEAS IS BEING BIG
He is a great philosopher. 
Academic heavyweights. 
In the framework we propose, these conceptual metaphors are thus re-
garded as special instances of the general eating metaphors identified above 
and, being interrelated, as forming a metaphoric network: 

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410
Hans-Georg Wolf and Frank Polzenhagen
Figure 1. Conceptual network: 
AQUIRING KNOWLEDGE IS EATING
.
This specific eating-metaphor network in the domain of 
INFORMATION
/
IDEAS
is common to all varieties of English (and is at work in various other lan-
guages, too). In the light of the discussion provided in Section 3.1. we now 
argue that in African varieties of English the entire network of eating meta-
phors is drawn upon in the conceptualization of the domains 
WEALTH
,
LEADERSHIP
, and 
WITCHCRAFT
. It is here where African English departs 
significantly from the conceptualizations of these domains found in the West-
ern varieties. In the latter, eating metaphors occur, at best, in isolation in these 
domains. 
Consider, first, the domain of 
WITCHCRAFT
. Traditionally, witchcraft is 
often understood as a beast living inside one’s belly (cf. Geschiere 1997: 
62), which has to be fed. This understanding most likely has motivated the 
more general conceptualization 
WITCHCRAFT IS EATING
. It is expressed in 
the following quotes: 
Her grandmother had eaten human meat somewhere from the other witches 
and she had promised that she would also kill her own relative and that they 
would share the meat. (Luangala 1991: 45) 
The head wife [...] was both ashamed and afraid to confess that she had 
been eating the life of the baby. (from: The Jealous Witch-Wife) 
This conceptualization has been carried over to the modern spheres of life, 
e.g. the domain of politics as in 

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