Phraseology and Culture in English

4. Conclusion 
We hope to have shed some light on the conceptualization and lexicaliza-
tion of leadership, witchcraft and wealth in the framework of the African 
community or kinship model. These findings may be taken as a further 
indication that the L2 varieties of English have become indigenized and can 
function as a medium for the expression of non-Western culture. Both ap-
proaches, the cognitive analysis and the comparative corpus analysis, have 
not been given much attention in the field of World Englishes, but we deem 
them to be powerful tools for enhancing our understanding of the cultural 
dimension involved, even more so when they are combined in a meaningful 
way. It is our conviction that these kinds of analyses can also be applied to 
other second language varieties of English and can serve as a sound basis 
for investigations of cross-cultural encounters where English is used as the 
medium of interaction. 
Notes
1. It is outside the framework of this paper to give a review of the two para-
digms. See Polzenhagen and Dirven (fc.) for a detailed discussion. 
2. The CEC was compiled as part of the ICE project (cf. ICE 2002) by a team of 
Cameroonians (see Tiomajou 1995). The corpus was near completion when 
work on it stopped. Therefore, only “unofficial” copies of it exist. We re-
ceived ours from Josef Schmied, TU Chemnitz, who participates in the ICE 
project and whom we thank at this point.
3. WCL is a text compilation thematically restricted to the domains of witch-
craft, material wealth, and politics. It has a total of 240,000 words and com-

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Fixed expressions as manifestations of cultural conceptualizations
427
prises 147 individual texts produced by speakers of African English. The texts 
were obtained exclusively from internet sources. 
4. It is far beyond the scope of this paper to review the rich literature on the 
issues we have chosen for analysis, i.e. community, witchcraft, wealth, poli-
tics and corruption in Africa. More detailed accounts and references to the lit-
erature from anthropology, cultural studies and the social and political sci-
ences are given in parallel publications. Wolf (2001) analyzes the case of 
Cameroon, Polzenhagen and Wolf (fc.) focus on the corruption issue, Wolf 
(fc.) focuses on religion and traditional belief systems. A comprehensive ac-
count is in preparation (Wolf and Polzenhagen in prep.).
5. We leave the discussion of the concept of “culture” itself up to the anthro-
pologists. For the purpose of this paper, we may define culture loosely as a