Phraseology and Culture in English

6. Some conceptual implications of these processes 
We claimed earlier that the kinds of change which brought about Aborigi-
nal English as a distinct dialect could not be accounted for in isolation from 
the shared sense of history and cultural identity of the speakers of this vari-
ety. It remains to make some further comments in support of this claim. 
Aboriginal Australians have intimate links with their land, supported by 
their beliefs about the “Dreaming”, when their Ancestor Beings created the 
various land forms, as well as by their history of several millennia over 
which they have gained subsistence principally by means of hunting and 
gathering. As we have already noted, land, language and social organisa-
tion were closely interrelated in the pre-contact life of the Aboriginal peo-
ple. The coming of the British interfered with this sociolinguistic ecology by 
fracturing social organisation, distancing people from their traditional lands 
and practices and causing English-based contact languages to arise and 
supplant many traditional languages. However, the existence of Aboriginal 
English is evidence of the fact that, even in the face of this upheaval, Abo-
riginal people kept certain markers of their aboriginality intact. Aboriginal 
English draws on the English system only in a qualified way. The meanings 
it has to express derive from different conceptual resources from those of 
other English speakers and the system has to change to accommodate the 
conceptual system of its speakers. 
6.1. Schema-related change 
It was noted earlier that a limited number of cultural schemas had been 
found to be frequently in evidence in oral narratives recorded in Western 

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Australia, and that the influence of these schemas could be evidenced in 
lexical forms and discourse features employed by the narrator. Some of the 
multi-word units discussed in this paper perform a similar function. 
Thus, for example, the Hunting schema can be seen to underlie such fea-
tures of the noun phrase as: 
noun compounds such as cattle snake, foot track, roo dog, racehorse;
noun postmodification, as in tail part;
the prepositional phrase goin(g) for …
Likewise, the following features of the verb phrase are related to this 
schema: 
get + NP to refer to the prey captured; 
go for + NP to refer to the prey sought; 
chase up and chase down to refer to pursuit and capture; 
adverbials fairly and right, expressing precision of observation and aim. 
The Travel schema is instantiated through such features as: 
collocations such as goin(g) bush, walkin(g) / goin(g) (a)long, camping out; 
the metaphorical expression riding the white horse ‘making damper’; 
the go + V construction to express ongoing movement. 
The Scary Things schema can be seen to generate such forms as: 
compounds featherfoot and little hairy man;
singing out, and leading away with reference to sorcery. 
The Family schema, and its entailments, is involved in such features as: 
possessive compounds mum mum and Marky boy;
compliment forms man head and woman head;
kin-related expressions claimin cousin, old girl and own mob;
the use of indefinite extension and that to refer to extended family. 

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Ian G. Malcolm and Farzad Sharifian
6.2. Processes of blending, metaphor and metonymy 
Aboriginal English gives evidence of active processes of linguistic innova-
tion in response to conceptual motivation. There are many blends which 
bring together shades of meaning which do not converge in Standard Eng-
lish, as, for example, in foot track; bunji man; law man and singin(g) out.
There are colourful metaphors, as in riding the white horse; racehorse; roo 
dog; foot falcon; cry for; scorch up; block up; patch up and charge up. 
There are also many cases of metonymic mapping, as in, for example, the 
use of a dinner time to refer to dinner; man head to refer to a precocious 
boy and featherfoot to refer to the avenger. 
6.3. Perspectivisation 
It seems possible from some expressions in Aboriginal English that certain 
forms of movement are conceived differently by Aboriginal and non-Ab-
original speakers. For example, in Australian English the sun is said to go
down, but our data contains the expression sun started comin down; in Aus-
tralian English one climbs up a hill but in Aboriginal English one climbs up
to a hill; Aboriginal English speakers often use the expression on top of the
ground where an Australian English speaker would say on the ground. 
6.4. Integrative versus abstractive conceptual principles 
It has been argued by one of the authors elsewhere (Malcolm 2003b) that it 
is possible to account for many of the divergencies between Aboriginal 
English and Australian English by invoking the principle of integration (in 
Aboriginal English) versus abstraction (in Australian English). Where Aus-
tralian English often provides the means to look at life analytically and ab-
stractly, Aboriginal English provides alternative means which enable ex-
perience to be viewed in an integrated way. Thus, for example, the suffixa-
tion of adverbs with -time is part of a tendency to mark time points ex-
perientially (e.g. long time, dark time) rather than abstractly (e.g. in years 
or hours); the attempt to anchor manner adverbs with -way and adjectives 
with -one or -fella represents an attempt to avoid using them abstractly and 
to integrate them into the experience from which they have been derived; 
the use of some phrasal verbs, such as share up and patch up, stresses the inte-

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gration of the activity described into a communal behaviour pattern; the 
tendency of the Aboriginal English speaker to provide “indefinite exten-
sion” so that context can be acknowledged, even if inexplicitly, is an alter-
native to the more context-free means of expression which is typical of 
Australian English.