Phraseology and Culture in English

6. Conversational routines and conventionalisation 
Conversational routines are defined in terms of what they are conven-
tionally used to do rather than in terms of their literal meaning. When

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Idiomaticity in a cultural and activity type perspective
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we hear ‘this is /name/’ we expect the phrase to have the force of self-
identification. Another way of saying this is that the phrase is automat- 
ized. ‘Automatized linguistic expressions are those which are typical, ex-
pected, routine, and therefore immediately interpretable’ (Hanks 1996: 
238). The close association between form and meaning makes one alterna-
tive almost obligatory although several alternatives are grammatically pos-
sible:
Why is it that I can introduce myself with My name is Steve, but not I was 
given the name Steve; that I can express sympathy with you with I am sorry 
but not conventionally with That saddens me; that I express outrage with 
Really! but not with In truth!; that I can say I am delighted to meet you but 
not idiomatically I am gratified to meet you; that I can choose a pastry by 
saying I’d like that one but not I’d admire that one, and so on. And to every 
specification of proper usage there tends to be a corresponding restriction 
on interpretation. (Levinson 2000: 23) 
According to Levinson, we would have to specify for the routine My name 
is Steve that it is used for introducing oneself. The theory suggested by 
Levinson implies that we distinguish a special level where we account for 
the correlation between how language is used and its normal interpreta-
tion.
It is … at this level naturally, that we can expect the systematicity of infer-
ence that might be deeply interconnected to linguistic structure and mean-
ing, to the extent that it can become problematical to decide which phenom-
ena should be rendered unto semantic theory and which unto pragmatics. 
(Levinson 2000: 23) 
Such a theory (Levinson’s theory of GCI ‘generalized conversational 
implicatures’) can deal with the representation of idioms and routines which 
cause problems in linguistics because of the split between literal meaning 
and function. In particular, the theory accounts for the fact that conversa-
tional routines are word-like and that they are acquired and used as wholes 
by analysing them on a different level of meaning from where utterances 
are created at the spur of the moment.