Phraseology and Culture in English

4. Summary of the results 
The analyses aimed at spotting cultural traits in collocations of English, 
Russian and German. These were expected to show up in differences in 

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Hot, heiß, and gorjachij
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these languages’ collocational repertoires and are understood to motivate 
the language-specific nature of the latter. 
The results this corpus study brings to light are the following: 
1. 
There is considerable overlap in what speakers of English, Russian 
and German associate with the respective forms of 
HOT
.
2. 
The differences found are the consequence of the fact that the lan- 
guages at issue do not all employ the same metaphorical mappings, 
which in turn suggests that they have different cultural and folk 
models as a basis for particular conceptualizations, or that – from 
the same cultural models – different aspects are selected for con-
ceptualizing and verbalizing a comparable phenomenon or event. 
4.1. Overlap in usage 
The most obvious overlap can be noticed in the literal sense of the word at 
issue. Since this reading is associated with the domain of temperature, a 
simple, concrete and basic experience all people make in basically the same 
way, this is exactly what could be expected (cf. Section 3.1. above). How-
ever, what a careful analysis of the collocations in broader contexts (and 
also the discussion with native speakers) brought to light is a slight mis-
match in the profile of 
HOT
. I identified the profile of 
HOT
to be the upper 
end of the temperature scale. This is undisputed. However, what is not 
identical in the languages under analysis is the range that is covered by 
“upper end”. It turns out that E hot covers a broader range of temperature 
than G heiß in that it starts at a lower temperature than heiß. That means 
that in English usage, a hot day is not necessarily as hot as G heißer Tag,
but can also be equivalent to G warmer Tag. Russian has two adjectives to 
offer for the expression of the literal meaning of 
HOT
. The data reveal that 
also here, the range of “upper end” is not identical: gorja
þ* is a more exact 
match of G heiß, whereas žark* seems to be a more exact equivalent of E 
hot.
There is also overlap in the extended senses of 
HOT
, that means quite a 
few of the metaphorical mappings identified are found to be employed in 
English, Russian, and German alike, such as 
DANGER IS HEAT
,
ANGER IS 
HEAT
, for example. 
As regards the functions in which the search words were found and the 
senses they render, there is also a tendency common to all three languages: 

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Doris Schönefeld 
in both predicative and adverbial usage, there is much less variety in the 
senses displayed: predicative 
HOT
is found in its literal sense, and in the 
senses of emotion and danger, adverbial 
HOT
is found predominantly and 
almost exclusively in its emotional sense. 
From the perspective of this paper, I will now focus on what the differ-
ences are. 
4.2. Differences in usage 
When we look at the extended senses realized by the individual languages’ 
collocations, English displays the richest assembly of senses. They are 
compared with Russian and German usage in Table 10: 
Table 10. Extended senses in a cross-linguistic perspective
Sense English 
Russian 
German 
1. literal sense (temperature) 
x 
x 
x 
2. intense emotion 
a) 
excitement 
x x x 
b) 
lust 
x 
Ø 
x 
c) commitment / involvement x 
x 
x 
d) 
passion 
x x x 
e) excitement / topicality 
x 
x 
Ø 
f) 
impatience 
Ø 
x 
Ø 
g) anger 
Ø x (idiom) 
x 
Ø 
3. intense sensation 
a) 
taste 
x 
Ø 
Ø 
b) 
perception 
x x Ø 
4. close to match 
a) close to success 
x 
x 
x 
b) close to ideal 
x 
Ø 
Ø x (idiom) 
5. being close to final stage 
a) 
goal 
x 
Ø 
x 
6. 
danger 
x x x 
The mappings having been found in the idioms make the list more com-
plete: of all the mappings identified, English covers the most (12 out of 13), 
Russian comes next (9 out of 13) and German comes last (8 out of 13) 

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Hot, heiß, and gorjachij
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(though, from my native competence, I could add the mappings (2e), (2f) 
and (2g) to German). 
The first thing that can be seen from the table is that the TDs specified 
for the more general mappings are not instantiated by the same range of 
more specific concepts: intense emotion is not verbalized by E hot when it 
is impatience; intense emotion is not verbalized by R gorja