Phraseology and Culture in English

particular view of reality as shared by a group of people, resulting in certain 
social practices, of which language is an integral part. 
6. See, e.g., Schatzberg (2001), Chabal and Daloz (1999), Geschiere (1995), 
Moore and Sanders (2001), Niehaus (2001). 
7. An elaboration of the notion of conceptual metaphor is given in the more re-
cent framework of Blending Theory (see, e.g., Fauconnier 1997), on which 
our approach partially leans. 
8. On the relation of the two notions, see Kövecses (1999) and Dirven, Wolf and 
Polzenhagen (fc.). 
9. See Geschiere (1997), Bastian (1995 online), Niehaus (2001), and Moore and 
Sanders (2001) for a discussion from an anthropological perspective. 
10.
IMPORTANT IS BIG
is, of course, not an eating metaphor in itself. In the logic of 
the network, however, 
BEING BIG IS HAVING EATEN
and 
BEING BIG IS HAVING 
FOOD
, which links up to and integrates the metaphor 
IMPORTANT IS BIG
.
11. See Kövecses (2002: 16, 73) for discussion and the Conceptual Metaphor Home 
Page for further examples. 
12. Compositionality is well-known to be a problematic issue. We share Turner 
and Fauconnier’s (e.g. 1995 online) view that even literal language can hardly 
be described compositionally. 
13. An analysis of fixed expressions in terms of underlying conceptual metaphors 
is proposed and undertaken, inter alia, by Glucksberg (2001). Accounts out-
side of the more narrow cognitive linguistics paradigm also draw this link, 
e.g. Moon (1998) in her corpus-based lexicologically oriented approach. 
14. A classification of metaphoric expressions along these lines is provided by 
Dirven (1994: 16ff ).
15. Gombo is also used in its metaphoric meaning in West African French. Com-
pare the following example: In a cartoon from Ivory Coast (Gbich N°108 2001: 
1), the abbreviation ONG (French for NGO) is spelled out as organisation na-
tionale de gombo (i.e. National Gombo Organization) [we owe this example 
to Stefan Elders from the University of Bayreuth]. 
16. Also note the equivalent item l’eau in Cameroonian French. 

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Hans-Georg Wolf and Frank Polzenhagen
17. For a telling example from West African English note that Cameroonians spell 
out the abbreviation CPDM of the current ruling party Cameroon People’s De-
mocratic Movement as chop people dem money [we owe this example to Sam-
uel Atechi]. Note that to eat money is found in Western varieties, too. There, 
however, it occurs only in very restricted contexts, scarcely beyond examples 
like this car eats all my money. Furthermore, and significantly, the equivalents 
of to eat and to chop in African French (i.e. manger and bouffer) display the 
same pattern observed for AE, again unlike the situation in Western French. 
18. This problem has significant implications for a theory of intercultural com-
munication, in particular with respect to English as a global language. Spe-
cifically, it calls for a meaning-oriented pragmatics which focuses on the im-
pact of the participants’ cultural models. For an outline of this approach, see 
Wolf and Polzenhagen (ms.). 
19. Studies include the paradigmatic article by Leech and Fallon (1992), a chapter 
in Stubbs (1996), and some work by Wolf (2001, 2003, fc.). 
20. Keyword should not be confused with search word, terms which are some-
times interchangeably used (see, e.g., Barnbrook 1996: 67; Oakes 1998: 151), 
but is a word which is significantly more frequent or “key” in one corpus / va-
riety than in other ones and thus has socio-cultural significance. 
21. See Leech, Rayson and Wilson (2001: 1–20) on methodological issues of cor-
pus exploitation, especially on dangers of over-interpretation. 
22. In WordSmith (Scott and Oxford University Press 1998: help menu), “a word 
is said to be ‘key’ if a) it occurs in the text at least as many times as the user 
has specified as a Minimum Frequency b) its frequency in the text when com-
pared with its frequency in a reference corpus is such that the statistical prob-
ability as computed by an appropriate procedure is smaller than or equal to a 
p-value specified by the user.” 
23. Specific titles, e.g. president or king, are not included, for differences in the 
political systems. 
24. Destroy and destruction are also keywords in the CEC, but it is fair to say that 
they appear only rarely in reference to witchcraft in this corpus. Therefore, 
they are not listed in table 4. 
25. For more on the 
WITCHCRAFT
domain in the respective corpora, see Wolf (2003). 
26. This approach bears some obvious parallels to contextualist theories of mean-
ing. By Firth, to refer to an early account along these lines, collocations are 
seen as a genuine aspect of word meaning: He states that one “shall know a 
word by the company it keeps” (Firth 1968: 179). In modern contextualist ap-
proaches to metaphor, e.g. that of Leezenberg (2001), this is modeled in terms 
of ‘thematic dimensions’ which are established by the context and inherent in 
lexical items, respectively. 
27. The asterisk indicates that the words were searched accordingly in the con-
cord tool of Wordsmith. 

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