Phraseology and Culture in English

particular collocational patterns as the manifestation of parallel conceptual 
activation patterns.
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Consider the following illustration. In Section 3.1. we pointed to the Af-
rican cultural belief that sudden or unnatural death is attributed to the appli-
cation of occult forces. Cognitively speaking, we argued that the concepts 
of death and of witchcraft are strongly linked, via a set of conceptual meta-
phors. Further links were observed between witchcraft and the concepts of 
health and wealth. Following the above assumption of simultaneously acti-
vated domains, this should show up at the textual level in the co-occurrence 
of items stemming from these domains. We exemplarily scanned all tokens 
of kill* in the CEC (roughly 170, excluding doublets). A significant amount 
of the tokens show a direct reference to witchcraft / magic, cf. the following 

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424
Hans-Georg Wolf and Frank Polzenhagen
occurrences (the italics mark items which belong to this domain and those 
of wealth and health): 
He was sorry he had brought shame to the family by his diabolical activi-
ties. [...] He had developed a certain evil urge to kill and kill. He had talked 
of a large cocoa plantation somewhere in the Kube Plains, where the vic-
tims were taken to some sort of slave labour Camp.
The first victim was a well-known trader based in Njinikom “round about” 
43. He is alleged to have killed more than two people by witchcraft and 
some are still critically sick in their homes. 
It should be recalled that in 1979 the fear of a woman of the spiritual world 
(mami water) is said to have swooked [sic] fear in the area as she was said 
to be moving around with a killer disease and “Kikeng” plant was used by 
inhabitants to prevent themselves from harm. 
So, in Palm-Wine, Kwengong and the women’s secret cult successfully kill
the Fon in order to liberate the people. 
In The Inheritance, lights go off when Sanga Tete invokes evil spirits to kill
Ma Mende. 
She said he had been initiated in to the famous witch-craft society called 
“Nyongo” and named two young men he had killed.
Corpus-linguistically speaking, such patterns are thus traceable via a con-
cordance in a numerically defined context. A defined context of 5 items to 
the left and 5 items to right of the token, the setting we used, would yield 2 
occurrences of witch*, 2 of evil, 2 of spirit*, etc.
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None of these items is, 
for instance, among the collocates of kill* in the FLOBFROWN corpus. 
Technically, however, such patterns are awkward to trace, given the enor-
mous amount of co-occurring content words even in a small context of 5 left 
and right. In communion with the indispensable text-analysis of the tokens, 
however, such patterns become apparent and may support claims about issues 
of underlying conceptualization. FLOBFROWN has a total of 428 tokens 
for kill*. A close comparative scanning of the occurrences in the FLOB part 
revealed that none of them bears a relation to witchcraft, which again sup-
ports the above assumptions on culture-specific conceptualizations. 
Formally speaking, such distant co-occurrence may appear insignificant 
to the study of fixed expressions. Conceptually speaking, however, it may 
be regarded as a manifestation of the same phenomenon. In fixed expres-
sions, such conceptualizations are merely crystallized in entrenched formal 
representations.

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Fixed expressions as manifestations of cultural conceptualizations
425
The ancestor concept is another case in point to demonstrate that collo-
cations are indicative of conceptual links but may be more or less formally 
entrenched. For example, ancestor* collocates with deities 7 and with cult
6 times in the CEC, though only ancestor cult seems to be a fixed expres-
sion (4 times). Nevertheless, we also find the words living (6), contact (3), 
God (3), gods (3), royal (3), supreme (3), children (2), divine (2), spiritual
(2), rites (2) which can be assigned to the domains discussed in relation to 
conceptualizations regarding the ancestors in Section 4.1. In FLOBFROWN, 
ancestor* does not collocate with any content word except for bred more 
than one time. A look at collocations with ancestral is even more revealing: 
Table 5. CEC – collocates with ancestral (from Wolf 2003).