Phraseology and Culture in English

Fixed expressions as manifestations of cultural conceptualizations
415
Now his mouth was so full of the national cake that he could not even raise 
his voice against what he did not agree with. Power was very sweet to chew. 
(Luangala 1991: 146) 
At the phrase level, in addition to the fixed expressions given above,
we find the West African item to eat money and its Pidgin English equiva-
lent to chop money.
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They are especially frequent in the political context, 
as in 
How many million promises can fill a bucket when you eat money the way 
locusts eat tons of green. (CEC) 
All over the world, government is not bad, government is about service. It 
is the desire to serve. But here, you will hear people say ‘Ah, he don go 
chop money!’ (WCL, from Nigeria) 
“This national coffers koraa, where is it?” [...] “They’ve chopped every-
thing in it.” “But when you look at them, especially their mouths, nothing 
indicates they can chop so much money in so short a time o.” (WCL, from 
Ghana)
We continue with some further considerations on formal issues, against the 
background of Turner and Fauconnier’s (e.g. 1995 online) model of Formal 
Integration. Here, formal integration refers to the realization of a concep-
tual metaphor or metonymy on the linguistic surface, i.e., in particular 
types of construction. As an illustration of the underlying integration proc-
ess we will exemplarily discuss kinship terms in «NP of NP» constructions. 
Again, our approach is comparative. 
Consider first a non-figurative expression like father of Sally, analyzed 
by Turner and Fauconnier (1995 online) in the framework of Blending 
Theory. The item father evokes a generic kinship schema that includes, 
inter alia, the 
FATHER
-
CHILD
relationship. The item Sally creates a further 
conceptual space. Now, the formal construction «NP of NP» simply 
prompts us to put the conceptual packet 
FATHER
-
CHILD
into correspon-
dence with 
X
-
SALLY
, where 
X
is some unspecified individual. What is cre-
ated is a conceptual blend, where 
FATHER
-
CHILD
is specified to 
FATHER
-
DAUGHTER
and applied to 
X
-
SALLY
, thus using material from both input 
spaces and the generic space. Note that this conceptual complexity is not 
expressed by the construction «NP of NP» itself, which is equally used to 
represent various other conceptual relations (e.g. possession). At the formal 
level, the elements are only named, and then need to be conceptually inte-
grated.

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416
Hans-Georg Wolf and Frank Polzenhagen
Consider now items like father of the nation, son of the soil, daughter
of the land, which are fixed expressions in AE. Being «NP of NP» con-
structions, they are formally identical to the literal example discussed 
above. Take the example of father of the nation in AE (see Medubi 2003 
for a parallel analysis of the son of the soil example): Again, the kinship 
term (father) triggers the kinship schema, the element in the second NP, 
now, calls for an extension of the kinship schema in order to be concep-
tually integrated. For an African speaker of English, this extension is 
licensed by the deeply entrenched cultural conceptualization 
LEADERS
ARE FATHERS
. And, crucially, the entire kinship-based model of commu-
nity will be metonymically evoked here. The conceptual integration proc-
ess thus involves further material from additional mental spaces. As
exemplified in Section 3.1., two links are crucial here: the spiritual di-
mension of leadership and the nurture aspect, as crystallized in the re-
spective conceptual metaphors identified in earlier sections. Thus, father