Phraseology and Culture in English

particular, it focuses on formulaic language in cultural perspective. In what 
follows, I will attempt to summarize some of the ways in which the papers 
in each section extend our understanding of the cultural roles played by con-

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Formulaic language in cultural perspective
475
ventionalized patterns of use. I will also discuss methodological issues as 
relevant. I will then return to Pawley’s paper and the list of research ques-
tions he has devised to highlight theoretical concerns that had emerged by 
the 1970s and continue to require further investigation. Although most of 
Pawley’s questions have not been explicitly addressed by contributors to 
this volume, we will do well to review them before closing because, diverse 
though they may be in their cross-disciplinary concerns, they help to give 
us a “big picture” view of where we are going in the process of puzzling out 
the place of conventionalized expressions in language and culture as a whole. 
2. Guiding words, key words and collocational distinctiveness in 
cultural perspective 
The papers by Anna Wierzbicka, Bert Peeters, Monika Bednarek and Wolf-
ram Bublitz, and Doris Schönefeld in this volume focus on single lexemes 
and their collocational predilections. In each case, familiar English words 
are revealed as having culturally specific configurations of use that offer sug-
gestive insights into the preoccupations and values of the societies in which 
they serve as common currency. 
Wierzbicka’s illuminating essay traces the development of a “cultural 
script” (Strauss and Quinn 1997) that is epitomized – or indexed – by the 
collocation reasonably well. She counters Sinclair’s (1991) doubts about 
the feasibility of adequately defining and explaining frequently used words 
by distinguishing in fine detail between different meanings of reasonably
and showing how these have evolved from a bifurcation in the meaning of 
reasonable dating back to a shift in Locke’s (1959 [1690]) usage in the late 
seventeenth century. Wierzbicka argues convincingly that reasonable is a 
“guiding word” (at least in long established English speaking cultures). As 
such, it operates in a powerful, though largely out-of-awareness, way through 
a range of conventionalized collocations that encapsulate (Stubbs 2001) the 
knowledge that native speakers acquire in the course of primary socializa-
tion and which they use to guide their evaluations of behaviour and situ-
ational outcomes in daily life. 
Methodologically, Wierzbicka’s paper provides a structured guide for 
similar research. She clearly explains the steps used in her investigation. 
These include the generation of a set of research questions to structure the 
inquiry initially and details about corpora and other resources used. The guid-
ing questions asked include why reasonably collocates with some words 

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Penny Lee
and not others that might logically be expected to follow the same pattern, 
why the direct translation of reasonably well into French is not found with 
the same frequency as the English phrase, why the target phrase is more 
commonly found in spoken than written language, whether a meaning for 
reasonably can be extracted from the collocation (or whether the colloca-
tion has a separate global meaning) and, if so, how that meaning is related 
to the use of the same adverb used ad-verbally or ad-adjectivally. Begin-
ning with her last question, the relationship between the different meanings 
of reasonably, Wierzbicka first turns to dictionary definitions, then quickly 
shows that these are not only circular but that they also do not accommo-
date a range of familiar use patterns she cites. A difference between uses of