Phraseology and Culture in English

4. Assumptions about the relationship “language – cognition – 
culture”
If we want to investigate the relationship between textual representation 
and society, we can start by focussing on the interplay of conventional-
ised, routine language use and its presumed attendant conceptual schemas 
based on a shared cultural background. Texts need to be analysed as ex-
pressions of culture where cultural experience is manifest in people’s 
language use. 
A useful theoretical approach is Foucault’s (e.g. 1980) constructivist con-
cept of discursive formations that places linguistic utterances in relation to 
social agency. Discourse, which is public and frequent, can construe new 
topics. It construes and defines people’s knowledge and regulates communi-
cation about the respective topics. A discursive formation contains every-
thing said and written about a particular topic, in a particular span of time, 
distilled into an abstracting model of knowledge and experience shared by 
the cultural community. Discursive formations are always intertextual in that 
elements, e.g. particular keywords in their collocations and phrases, fulfil 
functions in various texts and discourses. People construe cultural signifi-
cance through shared (linguistic) agency; and they do this in conventional-
ised ways. 
Searle’s (1995) argument, which is also contructivist, goes further in 
discussing how institutional (i.e. cultural) facts always presuppose a semi-
otic system. Only if we can communicate about, agree on and integrate 
some experience into our discourse and cultural practice, can we accept 
conventions as institutional facts. His typical example is the status of items 
considered to be money, with all legal consequences, just because each 
individual member of a society has agreed on it to be so, largely on the 
basis of a net of linguistic representations. With respect to tourism, a rather 
abstract, though linguistically transmitted, element of trust in a system of 
buying services, maybe even “experience”, is visible. The entire tourism 
branch is regulated by (a semiotically based system of) law and institutions. 
Halliday’s (1978) concept of “duality” captures the reciprocal relation-
ship between this cultural-institutional and the individual-cognitive aspect. 
Against the background of the community and its shared language use, the 

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Andrea Gerbig and Angela Shek 
individual develops his or her social and linguistic competence, such as, 
e.g., views about, and means of communicating about, tourism. The indi-
vidual’s language use, within the boundaries of the language norm
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, then 
systematically re-enforces as well as gradually modifies existing institu-
tions and the language system where continual use, with slight variations, 
shows the diachronic perspective (cf. Halliday 1992 and 1993). Significant