Phraseology and Culture in English

Formulaic language in cultural perspective
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thoughtful theoretical discussion of what it means to talk about relation-
ships between language, cognition and culture is also offered. 
The authors instructively make use of constructivist concepts synthe-
sized from a variety of sources and argue that corpus analysis can highlight 
“norms, routines and deviances probably not obvious to the language user”. 
References to Halliday’s (1978) concept of “duality” acknowledge the re-
ciprocity of the relationship between “cultural-institutional” and “individual-
cognitive” processes in diachronic variation (Halliday 1992, 1993). Although 
the terminology is different, the point is the one I made in the previous sec-
tion when discussing the dialectical interplay between psycholinguistic and 
sociolinguistic constitutive processes. Gerbig and Shek’s review of litera-
ture on collocational activity and associated formulaicity in language further 
consolidates the theoretical foundation they provide for their tightly con-
strained investigation of collocational patterns associated with the key words 
tourist/tourists and travel and the phrase package holiday. “Intertextual nets” 
in which concepts are delimited by their neighbours are identified in the data 
and used to show cultural shifts in relation to who is able and expected to 
travel, and to show changing values with regard to the benefits of travel. 
The authors make a strong case for including corpus-based studies of the 
kind they model in larger ethnographic investigations, emphasizing the value 
of including a linguistic focus in such studies. I would concur, having long 
been concerned about tendencies in the social sciences to focus on the con-
tent of what informants or their texts say without turning metalinguistic 
attention onto the language patterns themselves. If language, and especially 
highly entrenched formulaic language, is constitutive of linguistic thinking, 
then studying these patterns helps to show the structure of cognitive activ-
ity whenever it involves activation of the internalized linguistic system at 
any level, overt or covert. To say that there are always alternative ways of 
saying things, that the creative potential (Sinclair’s 1991 “open principle”) 
is always available even when habitual formulations are more readily ac-
cessible, is not, in my opinion, to prove that there is “no direct link between 
language use, cognition and culture”, as Gerbig and Shek cautiously ob-
serve. What it does prove is that we are not bound to make particular utter-
ances in particular contexts, like automatons. This point was made by many 
leading linguists in the mid-twentieth century, not least by Hockett (1968) in 
his joust with Chomsky as the creativity banner began to prevail over that 
of habitual behaviour, or as we say now, conventionalization. As Hockett 
pointed out (p. 54), stability in a system is not to be confused with determi-
nacy (or ‘well-definition’). 

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488
Penny Lee
Neither culture nor cognitive activity can exist without language in a 
languaging species. If these phenomena are inextricably interrelated, as is 
so often stated, this must be taken into account when relationships between 
them are discussed, as I argued at length in Lee (1996). Language, as 
Chomsky stressed, is essentially a mental as well as a social phenomenon 
and linguistics is one of the cognitive sciences. Although some kinds of 
cognitive activity do not involve linguistic processes, they are more rare 
than we might like to think in the case of most people. Not only does cul-
ture integrally include much that is linguistic, but we, as individuals, are 
also significantly enculturated through language and cannot easily thereaf-
ter separate process from product. We plan, solve problems, and understand 
relationships and events through the use of culturally sanctioned and idio-
lectally internalized scripts, frames or schemata that come into being as a 
function of habitual exposure to, and use of, language patterns available in 
social environments. It is often difficult to separate language and thought 
introspectively and is similarly problematic from a theoretical point of 
view. This is the case even though certain kinds of thinking (for instance 
some kinds of planning and problem solving) do not involve language, and, 
as Sapir (1921: 14) wryly reminds us with his reference to the “grooves of 
habitual expression”, some highly conventionalized utterances do not re-
quire conscious attention or a monitorable level of cognitive engagement.