Phraseology and Culture in English

Hot, heiß, and gorjachij: A case study of
collocations in English, German, and Russian 
Doris Schönefeld 
1. Introduction 
This contribution aims at finding evidence for the interrelation between lan-
guage and culture at the level of collocations. These have been found to be 
language-specific in a number of ways. That is why taking a cross-linguistic 
perspective might help to elucidate what exactly these language-specificities 
are, and what it is that motivates them. Since collocations as habitual co-
occurrences of words seemingly reflect repetitive experiences of their users 
(i.e. culturally shared knowledge), I take these questions to be instrumental 
in discovering some interesting aspects of where language and culture meet.
The collocations serving as a basis for the analysis have been elicited for 
English (E), Russian (R) and German (G) from usage data available in com-
puter-readable corpora of the respective languages. The sample node word 
is E hot, R gorja
þ* / žark*, G heiß
1
. The analysis will focus on the syntac- 
tic and semantic characteristics of the data found, particularly so on the 
differences coming to the fore, and interpret the findings from the adopted 
perspective of getting at the cultural dimension implied in a language’s 
wording.
2. Collocations 
Before actually starting the discussion, I shall briefly determine my under-
standing of collocation. I use the term to refer to phrases or fragments in a 
sentence in which the selection of words is not free, that is, in which all or 
some lexico-syntactic choices are pre-empted. This gives room to subsume 
habitually co-occurring words of various degrees of stability, ranging from 
idioms at the one extreme to fragments with variable items at the other, 
with the proviso that the latter co-occur more often than chance would pre-
dict. The term goes back to Firth (1957: 11, 14), who established the con-
cept of “collocation” to denote the syntagmatic relations between actual 

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Doris Schönefeld 
words. My reading is slightly more extensive in that it focuses not only on 
a word’s preferences for the company of particular other words, but also for