Phraseology and Culture in English

reasonably with verbs and adjectives highlights a subtle contrast that might 
otherwise have gone unnoticed. The use of Natural Semantic Metalanguage 
(NSM) is also explained and promoted as a means of moving to a yet more 
finely grained decomposition of meanings. 
A reserved tentativeness fundamental to the cultural script is highlighted 
when attested uses of it is reasonable to are examined and found to occur 
mainly with verbs of thinking and saying. The “epistemic reserve” implicit 
in these examples is summarized using NSM and then explained in more 
detail in associated commentary. That a modern (down-toning) interpreta-
tion of “reasonableness” exists is then demonstrated with reference to chang-
ing uses of the word over time and an interesting review of historical com-
mentary on the British Enlightenment – the Age of Reason. Reason was 
unequivocally a “key word” (Wierzbicka 1997) in the eighteenth century, 
being highly salient, not only to philosophers, but to the proponents of the 
new empiricism, which valued the practicality of demonstrable, if probabil-
istic, knowledge above all. With it, certainty had to be set aside, reasonable-
ness taking its place and becoming, three centuries later, the core of the cul-
tural script Wierzbicka explores. The value of using historical evidence for 
cultural changes in ways of thinking about experience that are linked to 
conventionalized language patterns is particularly interesting when we re-
member Whorf’s (1956 [1941]: 159) comments on relations between cul-
tural norms and linguistic patterns: 
There are connections but not correlations or diagnostic correspondences be-
tween cultural norms and linguistic patterns. … There are cases where the 
“fashions of speaking” are closely integrated with the whole general culture, 
whether or not this be universally true, and there are connections within this 
integration, between the kind of linguistic analyses employed and various 

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Formulaic language in cultural perspective
477
behavioural reactions and also the shapes taken by various cultural devel-
opments. … These connections are to be found not so much by focusing at-
tention on the typical rubrics of linguistic, ethnographic, or sociological de-
scription as by examining the culture and the language (always and only when 
the two have been together historically for a considerable time) as a whole 
in which concatenations that run across these departmental lines may be ex-
pected to exist, and, if they do exist, eventually to be discovered by study. 
On the basis of her findings and the detailed analysis she provides, Wierz-
bicka hypothesizes six logical stages in the history of the word reasonable,
arguing that the four final stages are all current in modern English, account-
ing for semantic variations found in the corpus data. 
That the guiding word status of reasonably is culture specific is demon-
strated by reference to a French corpus where raisonnablement is found to 
collocate differently from its English counterpart, to occur with lower fre-
quency and to have different semantics that, in general, do not support the 
cultural frame explored in this study. Further, Wierzbicka’s study demon-
strates that using authentic examples of the way people talk and write re-
veals, as Stubbs (2001) argues, that evaluative meanings and speakers’ atti-
tudes may be embedded in lexico-semantic structures to a degree unrecogn-
ized by those who rely on invented examples and believe that pragmatic 
meanings are chiefly inferred conversationally. 
Peeters’ entertaining and culturally revealing study of references to the 
weekend, and collocations of the word weekend in Australia demonstrates 
the virtues of good old-fashioned accumulation of examples of usage and 
related discussion over time. By trawling the web, consulting with friends 
and through personal observation, he has collected an impressive array of 
data relating to the iconic status in Australia of the phrase Land of the Long 
(or increasingly since the mid 1990s Lost) Weekend. The polysemy of 
weekender, the enduring significance in popular culture of the 1966 hit 
Friday on My Mind by the Easybeats, with its lyrics about yearning during 
the working week for the pleasures of the weekend, the common name for 
social events held on Friday afternoons or evenings (Thank God / Goodness 
it’s Friday (T.G.I.F.)), references to Friday as Poet’s Day (Piss off Early, 
Tomorrow’s Saturday), the phenomenon of Mondayitis and the use of 
highly formulaic farewells and greetings in workplaces (Have a good / nice / 
great weekend; Did you have a good (etc.) weekend?; How was your week-
end?; How did the weekend go?, etc.) are also revealed. Peeters argues for 
the status of weekend as a cultural key word on the basis of its high sali-
ence, not only in terms of frequency of use in general discourse, but also on 

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Penny Lee
account of regular discussions, both negative and positive, by media com-
mentators, authority figures and others about Australian attitudes towards 
weekends. That all the prefabricated expressions he describes participate in 
a well entrenched cultural script is suggested by the fact that the values 
they embody in relation to remunerated labour and carefree enjoyment of 
one’s leisure time do not mean that Australians actually work less than 
other people. Working hours statistics cited by some of Peeters’ sources 
show that we are evidently not immune to pressures of the globalized 
world, although we like to talk and think of ourselves, often with self-
deprecating humour, as though we are. 
A little more seriously insistent than Australian allusions to weekends 
is the use of the directive Enjoy! and its various more extended colloca-
tions (e.g. Enjoy yourself!, enjoy a/an/the NP, etc.) to remind consumers 
in the UK and USA that the point of consumption is enjoyment. Bednarek 
and Bublitz use corpus analysis (their sources, techniques, tools and pro-
cedures are fully explained in the paper) to explore this phenomenon in 
promotional and advertising texts. Their objective is to determine how 
distributional patterns illuminate a “fun-related ideology” revealed in the 
corpora examined. Confronting the contradiction inherent in the use of 
imperatives (a) in relation to the private matter of personal welfare and 
(b) in polite exchanges, they suggest that “happiness, fun or, indeed, en-
joyment are not regarded as private and optional matters but as public and 
obligatory assets” in the situations where the expressions are typically 
used. Their analysis seems to demonstrate that enjoy, being frequently 
out-of-awareness for users in the sense that it is not generally a matter of 
metalinguistic attention, is another guiding word in Wierzbicka’s terms. 
The authors argue that its automatic, habitual use functions to reinforce a