Phraseology and Culture in English

5. Formulaic language and dialectology 
Christian Mair (this volume: p. 423) cogently argues that phraseology is the 
“‘blind’ spot in variety identification”. Configurations of variety-specific 
lexico-grammatical features may be so subtle as to be identifiable only in a 
statistical sense and with difficulty, even then, if corpora are not large or 
representative enough. By contrast, distinctive pronunciation features con-
tributing to a recognizable accent are generally easier to identify and de-
scribe and are more consistently available in small samples of oral lan-
guage. This means that the challenge of differentiating between written 
forms of different varieties, where pronunciation is unavailable, is one that 
dialectology has yet to fully come to grips with. Mair argues that it re-
quires a shift from studying isolated words to engaging with the text at the 
level of style and discourse. Context needs to be taken into account, espe-
cially the level of formality or informality. A globally accepted core of 
language patterns provides the point of departure in assessing written texts. 

---

Formulaic language in cultural perspective
489
Varietal distinctiveness emerges probabilistically and provisionally wher-
ever choices are allowed, in formal written English at least. (We might note 
that electronic communication in new varieties of English is a whole new 
ball game for dialectologists from the point of view of lexico-grammatical 
distinctiveness.) Mair (p. 425) argues that “a discourse- and performance-
based model of variability in written English will also be a culturally sensi-
tive one” since collocational profiles that reflect varietal selection patterns 
and idiomaticity are necessarily cultural profiles. He goes further, asserting 
that: “idiomatic and collocational preferences are the most direct reflection 
of a community’s attitudes and preoccupations in linguistic structure”. 
Mair’s paper models an exploratory web-based approach to investigat-
ing differences between British, American, Irish, Australian, South African, 
Canadian, and New Zealand English. His techniques for establishing base-
line data against which variation may be measured repay careful study, as it 
is the use of the baseline range of occurrence of variety-neutral items that 
throws variety-specific patterns of occurrence into relief where they can be 
identified. Mair makes the point that, although collocations of interest oc-
cur in frequency ranges that are only just able to be dealt with using tools 
available today, ultimately the goal is comprehensive automatized profiling 
of collocational patterns to the point where the varietal origin of texts can 
be identified on language-internal grounds. 
Attention to conventionalized collocations in spoken language can also be 
useful from a dialectal point of view. This is demonstrated by Ian Malcolm 
and Farzad Sharifian and Daniel Schreier in their papers on Aboriginal and 
Tristan da Cunha Englishes, respectively. Some of the phenomena they de-
scribe operate as complexes of interconnected signals of shared identity (along 
with pronunciation features) that are generally out of speaker awareness, 
although noticeable by outsiders. Others may have high metalinguistic sali-
ence and be emblematic of that identity, as is sometimes revealed in com-
ments to outsiders who unsuccessfully appropriate patterns “owned” by the 
dialect group. This seems to be the case with greeting formulae in Tristan 
da Cunha, for instance. 
Malcolm and Sharifian’s compendium of processes involved in generat-
ing variety-specific lexemes and multiword units in Aboriginal English shows 
how lexico-grammatical patterning and metaphorical extension can be in-
timately associated with conceptual schemas of central cultural significance. 
They argue that this demonstrates that English has been appropriated for cul-
tural uses that maintain and nourish traditional ways of relating to the world, 
a point that is also made by Hans-Georg Wolf and Frank Polzenhagen in 

---

490
Penny Lee
their paper on fixed expressions as manifestations of cultural conceptualiza-
tions in African varieties of English. The latter authors bring corpus, cogni-
tive and cultural linguistics together to show that, in the varieties they study, 
key words collocate differently from the way they do in, for example, Brit-
ish English, and that they index culture-specific conceptual frames that are 
continuous with those traditionally structured and accessed through African 
languages.