Phraseology and Culture in English

of the nation is a complex blend of several conceptual elements, and, 
most importantly, it draws on conventional conceptual links. Again, this 
conceptual complexity is not expressed by the formal construction «NP 
of NP» itself. 
The conceptual integration process appears to take a markedly different 
course with speakers of Western varieties of English. For them, too, the 
kinship schema will be activated, and they will certainly arrive at some 
metonymic or metaphoric interpretation of items like father of the nation
or son of the soil. Note that in Western varieties, too, kinship terms are 
customary in at least some communities, in particular religious groups, 
though scarcely beyond. Furthermore, Western varieties do have a number 
of metonymically or metaphorically motivated extensions of kinship terms, 
e.g.
The father of sociology, Adam Ferguson. (FLOB)
People said he [George Washington] was denied children in his private life 
so he could be the father of his country. (FROWN) 
The most influential figure in this process was Tony Pastor, often called the 
father of American vaudeville. (FROWN) 
Hawthorne was a true son of clerical New England in his formal and even 
stately style. (FROWN) 
Here, however, the application of kinship terms is noticeably different 
from what was observed for the African context. Father relates to the ori-

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Fixed expressions as manifestations of cultural conceptualizations
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gin of a worldview or paradigm, a founder of a school of thought, a par-
ticular movement, or a country. What is highlighted is the notion of causa-
tion. Son relates to mere geographical origin, and inheritance of some 
worldview, respectively. The rooting in a full-fledged model of commu-
nity as in the African context and the related notions of reciprocal duties 
and patterns of expected behavior are virtually absent. This is also evi-
denced by the fact that in Western varieties the figurative extension is 
limited to particular kinship terms only, it is not the entire system which is 
transferred: We may call Freud the father of psychoanalysis and Ferguson 
the father of sociology, but psychoanalysts or social scientists of the re-
spective persuasion would not address each other as brothers or sisters.
And neither would people who belong to the business family / community.
Thus, these conceptualizations are “isolated.” Furthermore, they bear no 
spiritual dimension, which was observed to be crucial in the African cul-
tural model. Confronted with items of the son of the land / soil and father
of the country / nation type, Western speakers without a profound knowl-
edge of the African context would thus arrive at scarcely more than an 
interpretation in terms of geographical origin and, respectively, foun-
dation; i.e., they would fail to arrive at an adequate understanding of
these expressions as they are used in the African varieties.
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Cognitively 
speaking, the process of conceptual integration would yield a blend of
a different kind, given, for instance, the absence of cultural conceptual-
izations like 
LEADERS ARE FATHERS
,
LEADERSHIP IS EATING AND FEED-
ING
, and 
POLITICAL POWER IS MAGIC POWER
in the father of the nation
example. 
3.4. Further evidence from computer corpora 
As Wierzbicka (1997: 1) has stated, “there is a very close link between 
the life of a society and the lexicon of the language.” If socio-cultural 
concepts are reflected in a stock of vocabulary (cf. Eastman 1979: 216), 
one should expect that lexical patterns reveal and are consistent with the 
underlying conceptualizations. For the study of AE or other L2 varieties 
of English, one could carry this point even further. Not only are specific 
cultural concepts reflected in loanwords (e.g. nyongo above) but also in 
the use of words that belong to the common core of English, i.e., which 
are part of all the varieties of English. Since these items are, in the words 
of Kachru (1982: 9), “used in entirely different semiotic and cultural sys-

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