Phraseology and Culture in English

parts of this meaning-making process are of course construed by, and hence 
can be traced in, discourse. 
The concept of ‘representation’ serves as the uniting element between 
individual and cultural experience and cognition on the one hand and lin-
guistic encoding on the other hand. Representation is discussed in different 
contexts. Hall (1997: 17, 28) refers to it as “the link between concepts and 
language which enables us to refer to either the “real” world of objects, peo-
ple or events, or indeed to imaginary worlds of fictional objects, people and 
events”; or shorter: “Representation is the production of meaning through 
language”. Representations construe versions of the world, they construe 
views on how a culture “functions”. Although this might be a contested 
view of culture, it can be revealing to investigate pervasive everyday dis-
course that shapes – and is shaped by – the ordinary way a culture and its 
individual participants function. 
Such intricate relations between language, cognition (knowledge) and 
culture (in a broad sense) can be accessed via instances of language use in 
texts. These are most conveniently handled in the computer-readable for-
mat of corpora. Corpus analysis can show norms, routines and deviances 
probably not obvious to the individual language user. Representative cor-
pora are meant to cover large portions of a wide range of language use. 
Such corpora are repositories of a multiplicity of uses, providing a view on 
the variability and regularity of the system. In terms of a frequency distri-
bution, we can see cultural routines and conventions emerging from the 
collected utterances. A large, balanced corpus therefore provides concrete 
material to investigate such common, conventional behaviour that, given its 
frequency, is presumably significant in a culture and, in a way, is insepara-
ble from shared cognitive schemata and ways of conceptualisation. As will 
be discussed below, extended lexical units (units of meaning stretching 
over more than one word) are important linguistic representations of such 
conceptual and cultural schemata. 
We take schemata here as the connecting and analysable elements be-
tween the linguistic and cognitive / psychological levels, which are inter-
woven with the cultural frame. Large parts of our everyday life are based 

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The phraseology of tourism 
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on shared (interpretative) schemata, where schema is used as an umbrella 
term for a set of related concepts (frame / script / schema), describing cul-
turally shared knowledge about situations, events or structures. This in-
cludes institutionalised circumstantial elements together with regularly used 
forms of language. Bourdieu (1977: 72) uses the term “habitus”, describing 
the internalised results of our experiences acquired on a daily basis, within 
the frame of our social conventions. On the linguistic level, this concept of 
“habitus” can be investigated in the form of “semantic schemata” (Stubbs 
2001).