Phraseology and Culture in English

þ* / žark* when 
it is lust; intense sensation is not verbalized by R gorja
þ* / zark* and G 
heiß when it is taste. However, from the lack of verbal data we can con-
clude only with caution that the mapping is also missing at the conceptual 
level.
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For such a conclusion is inappropriate for mapping (2e) in German, 
for example. The blank there is due to the corpus data which lack expres-
sions signalling this mapping, but they are there in German: heiße Neuig-
keiten (hot news). Things like that need to be kept in mind in the further 
discussion.
A comparison of the individual mappings found in the respective data 
reveals that one mapping obvious in the English data (3a) is not instanti-
ated in the data of the other two languages. Does that mean that it is not 
employed there? As my competence tells me, German uses it too, though 
in a “hidden” way: expressions such as scharfes Essen brennt, brennender 
Geschmack (sharp dishes burn, burning taste) make it obvious that the 
construal focuses on the cause of the sensation (brennen (burn)) rather 
than the effect. Russian has ostryj vkys (sharp taste), the verb goret’ could
not be found in this sense, so that this mapping is at least doubtful for 
Russian usage. Thus, though Russian seems to also use a synaesthetic 
sensation, it is a different one: intense taste and the tactile sensation of 
being cut. 
Secondly and finally, I will topicalize an example of hidden mismatch 
between what looks identical. In both English and German, the data con-
tain the expression (a) hot iron / ein heißes Eisen. Though formally identi-
cal, these expressions do not mean the same. In English, we have two lit-
eral meanings depending on the use of iron as a count or noncount noun. 
In the former case, the expression refers to the hot or heated tool for 
“smoothing” cloth, in the latter – to heated metal. The latter also occurs in 
similes, where its literal reading serves as a basis for an explicit compari-
son, as in example (xix), reflecting the mapping 
INTENSE SENSATION IS 
HEAT
.
(xix)
... and the knife seemed to burn like hot iron ...

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166
Doris Schönefeld 
In German usage, ein heißes Eisen – reflecting the mapping 
DANGER IS 
HEAT
– is the same as a hot potato in English: a tricky and awkward prob-
lem. Of course, the expression may also be used in its literal sense of hot 
iron (metal). In Russian, the nonliteral sense is expressed by š
þekotlivoe
delo (a ‘tickling’ thing). Apart from these differences, the mapping 
DAN-
GER IS HEAT
shows up also in English and Russian expressions, such as E 
hot spot, hot issues, (get into) hot water, R gorja
þaja tema (a hot topic),
gorja
þaja toþka (a hot point). That means that particular mappings may be 
drawn on by all the languages under analysis, but need not show up in 
comparable verbal expressions. Or, the other way round, expressions that 
are formally alike need not always have the same meanings, especially 
when these meanings are the result of metaphorical and metonymic exten-
sions or mappings. 
4.3. Conclusion 
From what has been extracted from English, Russian and German usage 
data, I put emphasis on (some of) those cases where the respective words 
for
HOT
are put to diverging usages, i.e. where they enter into “idiosyn-
cratic” verbal combinations forming collocations in the widest sense of the 
word. The differences found suggest that there is also some divergence in 
the underlying conceptualizations 
HOT
is associated with in the languages 
at issue. On the other hand, it turned out that in cases of identical usage we 
cannot necessarily conclude or assume that such expressions label the same 
concepts.
The collocational differences uncovered appear to be related to the cul-
tural and folk models which people construct from experiencing their bod-
ies and their (physical and social) environment and which they employ in 
the process of naming the phenomena they are concerned with. As my 
analysis showed, such models are implicit in the expressions in the form of 
the frames needed and / or triggered when processing the respective expres-
sions.
As became obvious as well, taking a cross-linguistic perspective on col-
locations of the same node word helps to become aware of such frames and 
noticeably facilitates their identification. Having in mind the entrenched 
status of collocations, arising from repetitive usage, we can go as far as to 
claim that we can read from them what a language’s (and a culture’s) pre-
ferred or typical ways of making sense of the world are. The respective 

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Hot, heiß, and gorjachij
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language material reveals that, in talking about comparable phenomena, 
speakers in different speech communities may draw on different types of 
background knowledge (employ different models or frames) or construe it 
differently. This is also reflected in my results. Firstly, there are expressions 
(E hot pepper) which make it obvious that one language may reflect a par-
ticular conceptualization which one of the other languages, or both, lack/s 
(i.e. “gaps” turn up in the employment of particular frames or models). Sec-
ondly, there are quite a few expressions which, in the three languages, show 
a common underlying cultural model (constituted by a common underlying 
metaphor
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), but the perspective taken on it, what is highlighted and what 
remains a background aspect, is different (i.e. diverging construals become 
apparent).
These two aspects – evident in the examples discussed – make it obvi-
ous that in fact cross-linguistic differences in collocations are motivated. 
They can plausibly be accounted for by (complex) metaphors: some meta-
phors are not employed at all (lacking mappings), for others the expressions 
verbalizing the mapping focus on different correspondences between the 
source and target domains (variable “coverage” of the mapping potential). 
This suggests that different speech communities have conventionalized dif-
ferent aspects of metaphorical conceptualization. As a consequence, collo-
cations, reflecting a speech community’s habitual ways of “seeing” the world, 
can be understood as carriers of cultural knowledge. 
Notes
1. The asterisk is used for different purposes: at the end of a word it stands for 
deleted inflectional morphemes, placed initially it marks the following form 
as re-constructed. 
2. Within Cognitive Grammar the same problem has been discussed as a fig-
ure-ground / profile-base phenomenon, figuring prominently in the cogni-
tive-linguistic understanding of meaning as always implying a profile and a 
base. Writing about the 1st dimensions of imagery, the imposition of a 
“profile” and a “base”, Langacker (1991b: 5) elaborates on the base as a 
domain and the profile as a substructure which – by the expression – is 
made prominent within this base. “The base is … essential to the value of 
each predication, but does not per se constitute that value: a hypotenuse is 
not a right triangle, ... An expression’s semantic value does not reside in ei-
ther the base or the profile individually, but rather in the relation between 
the two.” As also pointed out by Cienky (1999: 190f), Palmer (1996: 186) 

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