Phraseology and Culture in English

part in Anglo-English discourse – and therefore, presumably, in the lives of 
its practitioners. This framework of evaluation is language- and culture-
specific and historically shaped. The phrase reasonably well epitomizes this 
framework. Paraphrasing Wittgenstein (1953: 222), one might call this ex-
pression “a whole cloud of culture condensed in a drop of phraseology”. To 
fully understand the framework of evaluation presupposed by speakers of 
English, we need to unravel the meanings of collocations like reasonably
well; and to be able to do this, we have to have at our disposal an effective 
semantic methodology. 
2.
Reasonably well – a first look 
Here is a representative selection of examples of this common collocation 
from the COBUILD Corpus: 
They would only let you do it if you had done reasonably well right through 
the course. 
I know the area reasonably well. 
For the first eight months all went reasonably well. 
It is a pattern that suits the majority of people reasonably well for most of 
their lives. 
Eddie and I have always got on reasonably well. 
Most people marry someone they know reasonably well. 
Held lipstick in place reasonably well although it began to fade after eating. 
Although shops and services of industries are doing reasonably well, manu-
facturing output is falling. 
La Goudola [Italian restaurant] is doing reasonably well. 
As well as being very common in modern English, reasonably well is also 
highly colloquial, as is illustrated by the relative frequencies of this colloca-
tion in three English corpora (all parts of COBUILD): 1.4 per million 
words in US Books, 2.1 per million words in UK Books, and 3.9 per mil-
lion words in UK Spoken. 
The use of reasonably well raises a number of interesting questions. 
First, why can one say reasonably well but not reasonably badly? For ex-
ample, in the COBUILD corpus, there are 113 sentences with the expres-
sion reasonably well and not one with reasonably badly. This fact cries out 
for an explanation. 

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Reasonably well
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Second, why does this collocation have no counterpart in other Euro-
pean (let alone non-European) languages? For example, why doesn’t one 
say in French raisonnablement bien? In the French COBUILD corpus there 
are 266 sentences with raisonnablement and not one with raisonnablement
bien, whereas in the English corpus there are 954 sentences with reasona-
bly and among them as many as 113 with reasonably well (by far the high-
est proportion of all collocations with reasonably). Again, this fact cries out 
for an explanation. 
Third, why is the collocation reasonably well more common in spoken 
language than in written texts? 
Fourth, what exactly does reasonably in the collocation reasonably well
mean? Is it possible to assign an identifiable meaning to it at all or does one 
have to assign a single, global meaning to the whole collocation reasonably
well? And if it is possible to assign a meaning to reasonably (in the colloca-
tion reasonably well), how is this meaning related (if at all) to that of the 
same adverb used ad-verbally or ad-adjectivally, as in the following exam-
ples:
Ad-verbal usage: 
“Who?” Stan asked, reasonably enough, I thought. “What?” 
Blake had held the King’s commission, but his conduct was totally unbecoming to 
what must reasonably be expected of every officer in the British armed services. 
One might reasonably expect a high IQ to be reflected in a high level of educa-
tional attainment. 
Of all these women only St. Eugenia may reasonably be supposed to have existed, 
and even in her case few details of her legend have any historical accuracy. 
It was just the ancient cross latch worked the way you wouldn’t expect, as he 
ought to very well know – there she was in bed with Lambert, albeit with so many 
clothes on, or such was her story, she could not reasonably be supposed to be 
sexually motivated. 
Ad-adjectival usage: 
Haig went to bed reasonably confident, only to be awoken at 2 a.m. on the 24
th
with a telegram from GHQ ordering an immediate retreat towards Bavai. 
Haig made one careful qualification: “This is, of course, on the assumption that the 
previous successes have been of such magnitude as will make it reasonably certain 
that by following them up at once we gain a complete victory and, at least, force 
the enemy to abandon the Belgian coast.” 
He left Calais reasonably satisfied. 

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52
Anna Wierzbicka 
On the first day of the battle, 9 April, the British were reasonably successful, though 
less so than Haig had expected. 
Thus we can be reasonably certain that Pope Joan’s monument, if it did indeed exist, 
was actually erected by an important Mithraic priest of the second or third century 
AD, many hundreds of years before Joan is said to have lived. 
To her surprise she found that counselling sessions were provoking memories of her 
teenage years; a time which she thought had been reasonably happy yet which she 
often found herself crying about. 
Without adding to the list of questions, let us stop to consider more carefully 
the last of them – the relation between the different meanings of reasonably.