Phraseology and Culture in English

Doris Schönefeld 
shows how the idea of profiling, i.e. the distinction of profile and base, al-
lows for the anchoring of cultural knowledge in a (linguistic) semantic 
analysis.
3. Palmer (1996: 5f) – elaborating on Fillmore’s claim (1975: 114) that “when 
you pick up a word, you drag along with it a whole scene” – suggests a classi-
fication of such frames or scenes, which also reflects these differences in 
“cultural load”: “Words evoke mental images that range from sensory experi-
ences as simple and concrete as a mouthful of hot buttered popcorn to concep-
tual structures as abstract and complex as the cultural postulates of true love. 
Some of the images called forth by words closely reflect the orientations, 
forces, and stuff of immediate experience. ... Other images and imagistic cog-
nitive models, still structured, but even more schematic or metaphorical, as of 
love, friendship, and marriage, make up the social contents of our world 
views (...).” 
4. This assumption deviates from other readings of the term “collocation”. Ben-
son et al. (1986: ix), for example, define collocations as “fixed, identifiable, 
non-idiomatic phrases and constructions” [my emphasis], whereas I attribute 
the feature of being fixed to rigid and highly established collocations only, 
and include idiomatic phrases, which is in line with Cowie et al. (1985: xii–
xiii), for example, who produce a complex categorization of word combina-
tions ranging from pure idioms to open collocations (for a similar view see 
also Partington 1998, ch. 1). 
5. It is an interesting question if – and if so, in what way – from the rich images 
of temperature sensation more abstract, skeleton-like concepts of such an 
image-schematic nature can be generalised. To my knowledge, temperature 
sensation has not (yet) been analysed from this perspective. It is also not 
contained in Johnson’s (1987: 126) (partial!) list of image schemata. Neither 
do we find any hint in Shore’s (1996: 59ff) elaboration on linguistically 
coded and non-linguistic cultural models, where image schemas and models 
arising from almost all our senses are discussed. Temperature sensation 
seems to be related to the schema of 
SCALE
, but it is not identical with it, 
since there is more to temperature, especially in terms of sensori-motor ex-
perience. Additionally, also a relation to the schema of 
BALANCE
seems plau-
sible.
6. Knowledge of the associated base or source domain is employed for the en-
tailments that go with the mapping. 
7. For a more detailed suggestion and discussion of potential sources of cross-
cultural variation in conceptualizations of metaphoric concepts (of emotion) 
see Gibbs 1994: 192ff; Kövecses 2000: ch. 9. 
8. This is seen from an analytical perspective. From the point of view of lan-
guage use, such a process is in the user’s awareness only for creative meta-
phors, i.e. those that are not (yet) entrenched. 

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Hot, heiß, and gorjachij
169
9. I am very much indebted to Silke Höche and Klaus Heimeroth, who did a 
great deal of the time-consuming job of extrapolating and sorting the data 
from the huge corpora used. All shortcomings that might show up in the 
analyses presented here are, of course, my own. 
10. The sum total of occurrences of hot is the result of an exhaustive search of the 
BNC. For reasons of feasibility, I included only frequencies of more than 5 in 
the functional analysis, which means that any occurrence of attributive hot
with a noun / predicative hot with a verb that occurs less than 6 times would 
have to be added. This explains the difference between the numbers for func-
tional distribution and the overall number of occurrences SARA extracts for 
hot.
11. Lakoff & Johnson (1980: 14) categorize such mappings as “structural meta-
phors”.
12. The French physicist Sadi Carnot employed this metaphor in an influential 
treatise on heat (published in 1824), where he extended the analogy to explain 
the work being accomplished when heat is cooled down (cf. Brown 2003, on-
line access March 08, 2004). 
13. For a discussion of whether there is a plus-minus parameter in image-schemas, 
in my case 
UP
, see Hampe 2005b. 
14. The elaboration of the construction of meaning by blending goes beyond the 
scope of this article and I refer the interested reader to Fauconnier & Turner 
1998, 2002 and Coulson 2001. 
15. This is a complex transitive construction (referring to the classification of 
clause types in Quirk et al. 1985: 53f), where the predicative link is between 
the object and its complement. 
16. The sum total of occurrences of gorja
þ* / žark* is the result of an exhaustive 
corpus search. For reasons of feasibility, I included only frequencies of more 
than 3/2 into the functional analysis, which means that any co-occurrence 
with a noun or with a verb that occurs less than 4/3 times would have to be 
added. This explains the difference between the numbers for functional dis-
tribution and the overall number of occurrences extracted for the two adjec-
tives. 
17. The usage of an adjective’s short form is predominant in the written lan-
guage, especially in books, it is also semantically marked in that it may
denote a temporary feature or state, or a feature in its relation to a particu-
lar subject / person. In contrast, the predicative long form may – if used
in the past or future tenses – take either the nominative or instrumental, 
with the former being typical of spoken language, the latter – of written 
texts. If used in the present, the nominative is used. Semantically, no con-
straints are effective with its use (cf. Pul’kina & Faxava-Nekrasova 1968: 
460).

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170
Doris Schönefeld 
18. The sum total of occurrences of heiß* is the result of an exhaustive corpus 
search for the lemma heiß, i.e. inclusive of such forms as heißen, heißt etc. 
(be named). The latter had to be neglected, the functional analysis focused on 
co-occurring nouns or verbs with a frequency > 5 only. This explains the dif-
ference between the numbers for functional distribution and the overall num-
ber of occurrences extracted. 
19. This is all the more important to remember considering my decision to restrict 
the data for the qualitative analysis to 5 or 3/2 occurrences of the nouns, al-
though the expressions found in one language’s data were cross-checked with 
the data from the other two languages. 
20. For a discussion of whether (conceptual) metaphor constitutes or reflects cul-
tural models, see Gibbs 1999 and Kövecses 1999.