Phraseology and Culture in English

particular way of relating to experience, backgrounding alternative ways. 
It is, in other words, a significant component of a cultural script pervasive 
in the cultures concerned, particularly in service and promotional indus-
tries. Different syntactic and semantic preferences of the target term are 
systematically investigated along with “clusters” (which have tighter 
relationships in probabilistic terms and are identified by the computa-
tional tools used) and some subtle differences are uncovered within an 
otherwise broadly similar configuration of findings in the two countries. 
If the authors are right, the widespread drifting of formulaic utterances 
involving enjoy as imperative to other parts of the world provides a subtle 
level of psycholinguistic support to the spread of cultural values associated 
with western consumerism. I say psycholinguistic in line with Whorf’s rea-

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Formulaic language in cultural perspective
479
soning about the role of language in cognition. Language, he argued, is deep-
ly and pervasively implicated in conceptual activity in a process he called 
“linguistic thinking”. In its most elusive form, linguistic thinking involves 
fleeting reflexes of the linguistic system activated in passing in predominant-
ly nonlinguistic conceptual activity. In its most easily observable (introspec-
tively) form it manifests as fully formed utterances “heard” inside the head 
as we plan something or try to puzzle out a situation that disturbs us. In be-
tween these two extremes lie a great complexity of modes and manifesta-
tions inescapably implicated in thought as a general phenomenon for any 
person who is a languaging being, i.e. has acquired language in the normal 
way in the course of social enculturation (Lee 1996). 
Schönefeld takes the English word hot as her starting point in making 
contrastive analyses of collocations of hot, heiss (German), and gorjachij (in-
cluding zark* as well as gorjac* in Russian). She takes care to define her 
use of the term “collocation” and to locate the study in a broader understand-
ing of the role of collocations in native speaker proficiency. Acknowledg-
ing the cultural specificity of collocations, particularly interesting in the case 
of words that relate to pan-human elements of experience such as the sensa-
tion of heat, she argues, following Shore (1996), that different convention-
alized mental models intervene to structure interpretation of experience 
built on the basic level of response to situations. Schönefeld suggests that 
what she calls the “cultural load” generated by such models is especially 
noticeable in formulaic language of all kinds, including proverbs and nurs-
ery rhymes, etc., and is more observable at the fixed end of the continuum 
compared with the more open end where its effects, nevertheless, may often 
still be seen. 
In her arguments about scalar concepts of temperature and the structures 
of concepts, Schönefeld draws on cognitive linguistic theory (Langacker 
1991; Palmer 1996) arguing that the “default sense” of translation equiva-
lents should be similar, other senses, including metaphorical senses of the 
words, being more likely to come under the influence of culturally specific 
mental models. We see in the notion of a basic or default sense an idea simi-
lar to that of Whorf’s “isolates of experience” (see Lee 1996, 2000, 2003 
for discussion). Whorf differentiated between “egoic” or internally experi-
enced isolates (relevant here) and “external” ones, e.g. the projections outside 
the body of visual images, their objects being conceived as existing in the 
external field in line with Gestalt theory. Schönefeld uses an etymological 
study of the target words to support her argument that the central sense of 
hot was originally construed in the same way in the three languages. In this 

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Penny Lee
context it is interesting to note that hot does not appear in Wierzbicka’s list 
of NSM primes, suggesting that research on non-European languages might 
reveal interesting culturally specific linguistic responses to the bodily sen-
sations in focus here. 
Systematic searches for attributive, predicative and adverbial usages of 
the target words in non-default use contexts, and for idioms, provides Schö-
nefeld with a comprehensive data base for exploring extended senses of the 
words, including metaphors. Her detailed discussion of metaphors provides 
a useful resource for others interested in exploring conventionalization em-
bodied in metaphors across cultures. Cross-linguistic comparisons in the 
categories of use studied allow a picture of variation patterns to emerge and 
suggest, to some degree at least, the activity of different cultural models or 
frames active in interpretations of experience anchored in the shared bodily 
sensations of heat. 
Together, the four papers in this section of the book provide a useful 
collection of approaches to studying collocational preferences of specific 
words and their cultural implications. We see the importance of defining 
key terms, providing full details of data bases (including their sizes, repre-
sentativeness and provenance), taking a historical perspective where rele-
vant, providing full details of steps taken in the research and reasoning with 
regard to each procedure, locating the specific inquiry within one or more 
larger fields of theoretical import, and explicitly drawing attention to ways 
in which the findings inform or challenge existing articles of faith within 
those fields.