Phraseology and Culture in English

3. Linguistic 
evidence 
3.1. A cognitive-linguistic analysis of the African kinship-based 
community model 
Our analysis is situated in a newly emerging field called “cultural linguis-
tics” (see, e.g., Palmer 1996; Sharifian 2003), which is an anthropologically 
oriented branch of Cognitive Linguistics. Cognitivists, be they linguists, 
psychologists, or anthropologists, share the assumption that language is part 
of thought and that by analyzing language, one can arrive at the underlying 
conceptual structure of its speakers. 
The method applied in this paper specifically goes back to Lakoff and 
Johnson’s theory of metaphor (see, e.g., 1980 and Lakoff 1994)
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and Quinn 
and Holland’s (1987; also see Strauss and Quinn 1997) theory of “cultural 

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Hans-Georg Wolf and Frank Polzenhagen
models”.
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According to the cognitivist view, a conceptual structure or ‘con-
ceptual domain’ – and we can call it a metaphorical conceptual structure if 
more than one domain is involved – can generate countless linguistic ex-
pressions, which in turn can be systematically related to one another on the 
basis of this conceptual link and attest to its existence. We follow the con-
vention to present the concepts / metaphors in small caps, and the linguistic 
examples in italics. To our mind, it is not always easy to decide if a concept 
is metaphorical or not. For the Western observer, it may be metaphorical, 
for an African, it may not. So, to avoid this trap, we prefer to speak simply 
of concepts or conceptualizations. 
In order to understand the more specific aspects of the model, it is nec-
essary to start out with a general explanation of the kinship concept and its 
ingredients. The kinship model of society may be taken as the extension of 
the family concept. As Schatzberg (1986: 10) notes, the African concept
is not altogether congruent with the Western notion of family. For in-
stance, though lineage is often crucial, it is not restricted to mere biological 
relationships. Aspects like age, particular duties (protection, nurture, etc.), 
and codes of behavior that transgress the biological borders are central 
components of the concept. The original reference point of the family con-
cept is the traditional village, and it is extended to various social units. 
Elements and values of the kinship system that are immediately meaning-
ful in the village are mapped onto newly emerged and emerging social 
structures. The resulting network is expressed in Mbiti’s (1990: 102) state-
ment that 
the kinship system is a vast network stretching laterally (horizontally) in every 
direction, to embrace everybody in a given local group. This means that each 
individual is a brother or sister, father or mother, grandmother or grandfa-
ther, or cousin or brother-in-law, sister-in-law, uncle or aunt or something else 
to somebody else. That means that everybody is related to everybody else. 
This horizontal network of kinship relations anchors the individual in vari-
ous social and regional communities. It establishes ties and, at the same 
time, cleavages. It thus constitutes a whole range of possible identities, each 
of which is determined by different criteria. Thus, kinship and community 
are interchangeable terms: 
COMMUNITY
is metonymically conceptualized as
KINSHIP
, and vice versa. Linguistically, these metonymies find marked ex-
pression in the well-known use of kinship terms in African varieties of Eng-
lish. The following example should suffice to illustrate the complexity of 
the mapping: 

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