Phraseology and Culture in English

Fixed expressions as manifestations of cultural conceptualizations
411
The killing and eating of Bokassa’s opponents is wrapped around the juju 
practices that by eating the dead body of one’s enemies one would acquire 
the desired qualities of the person eaten, especially the brave enemy. (WCL) 
The Igbos are always bloodied by the northerners; and it seems their blood 
is desired by the witch-heads of Islam, who can only maintain the potency 
of their spells with the Igbo people’s blood in their stomach. (WCL) 
and to the domain of material wealth. A whole network of concepts is im-
plicated here. In the frame of 
WITCHCRAFT IS EATING
, people (often mem-
bers of the same kin group) are conceptualized as 
FOOD
, as the examples 
above make clear. 
JEALOUSY
, the traditionally assumed driving force of 
witchcraft, and similar motives are conceptualized as 
HUNGER
. The result-
ing conceptual network may be schematically represented as follows: 
Figure 2. Conceptual network: 
WITCHCRAFT IS EATING
.
We further observed the strong conceptual links between wealth and witch-
craft. In the case of 
WITCHCRAFT IS A MEANS TO OBTAIN WEALTH
, people, 
or their body parts, are conceptualized more generally as 
RESOURCES
. Be-
ing big (cf. fixed expressions like big man, big woman, fat cats) is usually 
seen as an outward sign of being successful. Yet qua the associations of the 
eating domain with witchcraft, in the African context, these big persons are 
viewed with mixed feelings. On the one hand, being literally big stands for 
power, yet it may also evoke ideas of getting wealthy to the detriment of 
the community (see below). The link between witchcraft and wealth, and 

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412
Hans-Georg Wolf and Frank Polzenhagen
the parallel pervasive presence of the eating-metaphor network in both 
domains is manifest in the following corpus example: 
Kwengong invokes spirits which kill him and his stomack [sic] gets swollen 
because of exploitation, greed and corruption. (CEC) 
The numerous other examples of eating metaphors in the domain of wealth 
include:
Cameroon immigration use Nigerians to grow fat. (The Mail, September 5, 
2001: 1) 
Corrupt citizens dish out heavy bribes. (WCL) 
Few people dey fat with big money, and the rest dey hungry. (WCL, from 
Nigeria)
For I do honestly believe that in the fat-dripping, gummy, eat-and-let-eat 
regime just ended – a regime which inspired the common saying that a man 
could only be sure of what he had put in his gut. (Achebe 1988: 149) 
In terms of the network model proposed above, this may be captured in the 
following figure: 
Figure 3. Conceptual network: 
ENRICHMENT IS EATING
.
Against this background, the following sections will propose a cognitive 
linguistic view of collocations and fixed expressions and discuss the possi-
ble role of corpus-based analyses in the study of these phenomena. Gener-
ally, we take a comparative approach. 

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Fixed expressions as manifestations of cultural conceptualizations
413
3.3. Fixed expressions: Conceptual integration and formal integration 
We need to clarify how our above perspective relates to the study of fixed 
expressions and idiomaticity. In the standard view, idioms are regarded as 
fixed multi-word units which are, to varying degrees, non-compositional, 
i.e. their meaning cannot or not fully be recovered from the meaning of 
their constituents.
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They thus form a subset of fixed expressions, along 
with lexicalized compounds, proper names, familiar quotes, etc. Besides the 
respective degree of compositionality, idioms are often classified according 
to criteria like transparency and syntactic flexibility (see Skandera 2003: 
ch. 2 for an overview of theoretical approaches to fixed expressions). It 
should have become apparent that our account is not specifically along 
these lines. In this paper, we approach fixed expressions from the angle of 
the underlying conceptualizations and neither compositionality nor syntac-
tic behavior are our issues in the first place (for a brief discussion of some 
formal aspects, see, however, below). The linguistic examples given above 
for the information and ideas domain shall again serve as illustrations. The 
immediate relevancy to the study of fixed expressions should be obvious: 
All of the examples are strong collocations or even idiomatic and they are 
taken to be generated by conceptual metaphors.
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Our starting point is the observation that a conceptual metaphor or me-
tonymy may find its linguistic expression in various ways: The 
IDEAS ARE 
FOOD
metaphor, for instance, is expressed as an NP in a meaty book. In to