Phraseology and Culture in English

Formulaic language in cultural perspective 
Penny Lee 
1. Introduction 
Conventional ways of saying things are subtle indices of cultural preoccu-
pations and values, subtle because their automatic, routine, habitual nature 
renders them largely out of awareness for members of the culture, just as 
any other routine behavioural pattern, socially acquired in the course of 
enculturation, may remain out of awareness until violated in some way by 
cultural rebels, visitors or novices. 
The ability to reproduce and participate in strongly entrenched patterns 
of cultural behaviour, whether these be realized in the form of relatively 
ephemeral social markers or trends persistent across generations, is funda-
mental to being recognized as a member of any social group. Confident and 
authentic control of conversational ways of saying things that are character-
istic of particular groups is part of this ability. Acquisition of formulae in 
the course of early and later language learning must, accordingly, be as 
central to linguistic competence as to performance, to use the Chomskyan 
dichotomy without its distracting idealizations. Competence, in the sense of 
the stock of neurolinguistic resources individuals use to understand and 
produce utterances or written expressions recognizable as representative of 
particular languages, dialects or jargons, evidently includes a great deal that 
is reproduced verbatim or generated on analogy with previous utterances or 
expressions compatible with specific social situations. Performance, in the 
sense of externally observable language behaviour (also observable inter-
nally from an introspective point of view), provides us with data as cen-
trally important to theoretical linguistics as to our understanding of social 
or cultural phenomena. As such, we might expect formulaic language, 
phraseological proficiency and the cultural relevance of language pattern-
ing of all kinds to be recognized as central topics in linguistics, sociology, 
anthropology and education (just to name the disciplines that first come to 
mind) and find them treated routinely in introductory textbooks. 
That this is not the case in linguistics, although the shift must come very 
soon, is significantly a product of our history as a discipline. The relegation 

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of data from actual language use to the periphery of mainstream linguistics 
for several decades, the scornful mid-twentieth century dismissal of anal-
ogy as a useful construct in theory building, and the foolish separation of 
language as a mental phenomenon from its realization in socio-cultural situa-
tions of use impoverished linguistic science and rendered the role of con-
ventionalization in language production and use invisible to most linguists-
in-training. To say this is not to underestimate the enormous gains made in 
linguistics over the same period of time. It is merely to point out that an 
area of study cannot really be regarded as a “major field” of inquiry (with 
due deference to Cowie 1998: 1) from the point of view of a discipline as a 
whole if it does not warrant a substantial section in texts used to induct 
newcomers into the discipline. It is also, however, to affirm the currently 
escalating appreciation of real language data as subject matter that has 
come with the maturation of discourse analysis, lexicography, corpus lin-
guistics, cultural linguistics, applied linguistics and (patiently all the while) 
anthropological linguistics in recent decades. Such appreciation will lead to 
general recognition of the central status of conventionalization in language 
when investigators of specific phenomena increasingly locate their research 
in larger, more integrative theoretical frameworks and, in doing so, force 
textbook makers to reassess their priorities in new editions and in volumes 
newly designed for the twenty-first century. 
Andrew Pawley (this volume) delineates nine distinct areas where sig-
nificant progress in understanding formulaic language had been made as 
early as the 1970s. Literary scholars had discovered the role of formulae in 
modern and ancient epic poetry, while anthropologists, folklorists and eth-
nographers of speaking had documented the importance of fixed formulae 
with distinctive intonation in ritualistic behaviour of social groups ranging 
from British school children to Trobriand Islanders. Philosophers and soci-
ologists had studied speech routines in social interactions, emphasizing the 
conventionality of situation-bound expressions used in the performance of 
speech acts in a wide variety of culturally structured social contexts. Neu-
rophysiologically, it had become evident that routinized language is produced 
differently from novel utterances, while psycholinguistic explanations had 
been put forward to account for the fact that familiar chunks of language 
are produced more fluently than novel strings. A few educationists took up 
ideas about links between language, culture and worldview inherited from 
anthropological linguistics and psychology and noted that conventional ways 
of saying things often seemed to reflect, and also promote, particular ways 
of thinking about experience. Applied linguists explored the importance of 

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idiomatically apt phrasing in speech and writing and observed the special 
challenges that learners seeking high levels of control of new languages 
face in this regard. Some grammarians insisted that lexicon and grammar 
were not as easy to separate as current idealizations required. Lexicographers 
were producing phrasal dictionaries and, in Eastern Europe in particular, 
attempting to differentiate kinds of multiword units in systematic ways. 
Work on all these fronts has continued into this century, gaining strength 
over time, a testament to the ubiquity and significance of conventionalized 
language knowledge and use. Given the diversity of methodological ap-
proaches, terminology, specific subject matter and theoretical frameworks 
associated with these developments, however, it is not surprising that an inte-
grated broader field of inquiry, with recognized core principles, methods and 
research questions having self-evident parts to play in the construction and 
presentation of linguistics as a science, is still fighting its way into exis-
tence. That this larger field is still consolidating is suggested by the fact 
that its practitioners might come together in a volume such as this, while 
their primary academic allegiances remain with other named sub-fields of 
linguistics which do not, with the exception of lexicography, as Pawley (this 
volume) points out, currently give formulaic language or phraseological 
proficiency central places in the construction of their own sub-disciplinary 
identity. 
That it is not yet the integrated, coherent field it deserves to be on ac-
count of what is already known is also suggested by the paucity of cross-
referencing to the broader field of established knowledge and theory about 
conventional language in much descriptive work. Describing and generaliz-
ing across constrained sets of primary data within one’s methodological 
and theoretical comfort zone provides useful information for the broader 
field to build on. Additional value is added when such research is located in 
relation to theoretical frameworks relevant to understanding the larger sig-
nificance of the data and when descriptions are structured to support or 
challenge previously formulated generalizations and theories. Alison Wray 
(2002) is an outstanding example in this regard, with effective synthesis of 
diverse findings and meticulous acknowledgement of sources from an im-
pressively broad range of research fields throughout her book. 
The scattered nature of work done on formulaic language across the large-
ly non-intercommunicating “islands of research” listed by Pawley has, in