Phraseology and Culture in English

3. Conventionalization in proverbs, similes and modality clusters 
There are two senses in which language patterns may be regarded as en-
trenched: sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic. While the patterns themselves 
may participate in both kinds of entrenchment, and while the two are sig-
nificantly dependent on each other, it is nevertheless useful from a theoreti-
cal point of view to keep the two phenomena apart conceptually. Sociolin-
guistic entrenchment occurs when some language patterns are pervasively 
used in a speech community in preference to others that seem just as appro-
priate from an outsider’s point of view. Psycholinguistic entrenchment oc-
curs when, in a connectionist (Lee 1996) or network (Lamb 1999) sense, 
some language patterns are more heavily weighted, frequently activated and 
intensively interconnected than others in the internalized linguistic systems 

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of individuals. Such robust incorporation into an individual’s idiolectal re-
sources depends significantly, of course, on that person’s exposure to the 
patterns in their social environment (their social enculturation), but not ex-
clusively. People also have characteristic ways of talking (and thinking) that 
are truly idiolectal in that they index those aspects of the person’s style that 
mark them out as unique individuals. But for such individuals to also be 
recognized as members of speech communities, these idiosyncracies need 
to be embedded in matrices of patterns that are characteristic of social 
groups as wholes. When they are not, the person is not merely different, but 
functions as an outsider in both personal and cultural terms. 
As a distinctive and long recognized category of culturally entrenched 
formulae, proverbs are interesting in their greater accessibility to metalin-
guistic awareness compared with many other formulae. This is attested by 
the history of paremiology outlined by Charles Doyle (this volume). Col-
lections of sayings and proverbs (“fixed superlexical locutions” in Doyle’s 
terms) have been compiled for over five centuries, with the comprehensive 
Adagia of Erasmus of Rotterdam in the early sixteenth century being the 
first to offer serious study of the phenomenon rather than simply listing ex-
amples. As pithy repositories of received wisdom predominantly passed down 
orally from generation to generation, proverbs encapsulate insights into hu-
man nature, interpersonal relationships and life experiences in ways that 
may reflect typical patterns of reasoning or interpretation among the people 
who use them. If deeply entrenched within the culture, they also provide 
ready-made patterns of interpretation that are absorbed by individuals into 
their own belief and reasoning systems in the course of developmental so-
cialization. Once entrenched psycholinguistically, they have the “projective” 
power to shape understandings about events that Whorf and Sapir ascribed 
to language patterns in general (Lee 1996), except that their workings are 
less subtle and elusive than the focusing and selecting activity of lexemes 
and grammatical patterns. Proverbs are typically statements of perceived 
truths that overtly offer interpretations of events and behaviour, while single 
lexemes and grammatical processes work at a more fine-grained level to cov-
ertly organize attention to aspects of experience in culturally patterned ways. 
In terms of provenance, Doyle draws attention to the fact that at some 
stage every proverb must have been a newly created formulation, which then 
gained currency within a group before becoming more widely entrenched 
in a society. Here we see in action the dialectical relationship between the 
psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic, between idiolectal and cultural or com-
munal forces at work. Doyle also considers the issue of ephemerality, tradi-

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