Phraseology and Culture in English

Australian perceptions of the weekend: 
Evidence from collocations and elsewhere 
Bert Peeters 
1. Introduction 
Back in 1997, in the weekend supplement of the Sydney Morning Herald,
Tom Dusevic nostalgically reflected on some of the typical activities of the 
Australian weekend of yesteryear. “In Australia”, he said, “the weekend 
once attained the status of the sacred”. He then went on as follows: 
It was a time for mowing the lawn, sharing the Sunday roast, reading pa-
pers, pottering in the garden, retreating back to the shed, having a picnic or 
taking a leisurely drive to the beach. Perhaps it was a chance to worship – 
in the dress circle, the outer [ground, at a football match] or a pew. Satur-
day and Sunday had a different rhythm. The weekend was your own time, 
the rest of the week it was the boss’s.
1
Are Australian weekends no longer what they used to be? Has the Austra-
lian weekend somehow been “lost” – as pointed out in the title of Du-
sevic’s article, “The lost weekend” (emphasis added)? Many would agree. 
Regardless, it is a time of the week which, apparently more so than in 
other parts of the English speaking world, continues to play an important 
role in the collective minds of Australians, as I will seek to demonstrate 
below. First of all, I will present the essentially linguistic data which have 
led me to the belief that, at least in Australian English, the word weekend
is a key word (à la Wierzbicka 1997; cf. also Peeters 2004a). Then, I will 
provide a detailed semantic description of the word, using the now well-
established conventions of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM; cf. 
Wierzbicka, this volume). The NSM explication will be further corrobo-
rated by means of supplementary data, both linguistic and cultural. In the 
process, I will demonstrate that my initial hypothesis was right: the de-
scription leads to the identification of a related communicative norm and a 
related cultural value. To study candidate key words, in the hope of find-
ing relevant communicative norms and cultural values, is to engage in an 
exercise which I have dubbed elsewhere (Peeters 2004b) “cross-cultural 
semantics”.
2

---

80
Bert Peeters