Phraseology and Culture in English

2. Source 
materials 
The data used in further discussion are a selection of similes and other 
evaluative idioms drawn from electronic and printed sources, primary and 
secondary. The Australian corpora held at Macquarie University, including 
the Australian Corpus of English (ACE), and the Australian component of 
the International Corpus of English (ICE-AUS) provided examples of both 
fixed and lexically open constructions, supplemented by Google searches 
of Australian documents on the internet, done in February 2004. Historical 
examples came from Baker’s The Australian Language (1st ed. 1945; repr. 
1953; 2nd ed. 1966; repr. 1978), from Wilkes’s Dictionary of Australian
Colloquialisms (4th ed. 1995), and from the Australian National Dictionary
(1989), also referred to below as AND. The Macquarie Dictionary (3rd ed. 
1997) has been used for additional examples and information. In the fol-
lowing discussion, examples which can be found in at least three sources are 
marked with an asterisk, and the asterisked form can be regarded as their 
canonical form. Those which show lexical variation are referenced to a 
particular source. Where the primary source can be fully specified, it is 
given within the text below; otherwise it is indicated by means of the sec-
ondary source. Most of the material is from written or published sources, 
but the data from ICE-AUS include some from transcriptions of Australian 
speech. The written source material (printed and electronic) embraces a 
wide variety of genres, from novels and short stories to nonfictional docu-
mentary writing, and including both monographs and serial publications such 
as newspapers and magazines. 
From this range of sources, we will examine sets of conventionalized 
evaluative idioms, as well as lexically open idioms with variable formula-
tion. Both contribute to the range of phraseology that expresses Australian 
culture and common experience. In what follows we shall first review simi-
les and evaluative expressions whose terms invoke the land and its natural 
inhabitants, as well as the urban environment (Section 3). The recurrent 
social themes expressed are analysed in Section 4. Section 5 discusses the 
various rhetorical elements embedded in them. Section 6 synthesizes the 
argument that such phraseologies can be regarded as Australian cultural 
scripts.

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Pam Peters