Phraseology and Culture in English

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Phraseology and Culture in English
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Topics in English Linguistics
54
Editors
Bernd Kortmann
Elizabeth Closs Traugott
Mouton de Gruyter
Berlin · New York

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Phraseology and Culture
in English
edited by
Paul Skandera
Mouton de Gruyter
Berlin · New York

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Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague)
is a Division of Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin.
앪
앝 Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines
of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Phraseology and culture in English / edited by Paul Skandera.
p. cm. ⫺ (Topics in English linguistics ; 54)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-3-11-019087-8 (acid-free paper)
1. English language ⫺ Social aspects ⫺ English-speaking countries.
2. Language and culture ⫺ English-speaking countries.
3. English
language ⫺ Variation.
4. Linguistic geography.
5. Group identity
⫺ English-speaking countries.
6. English-speaking countries ⫺ Civi-
lization.
I. Skandera, Paul.
PE1700.P73
2007
306.44⫺dc22
2006034483
ISBN 978-3-11-019087-8
ISSN 1434-3452
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.
”
Copyright 2007 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, 10785 Berlin
All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this
book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechan-
ical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publisher.
Cover design: Christopher Schneider, Berlin.
Printed in Germany.

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Preface 
The proposition that there is a correlation between language and culture or 
culture-specific ways of thinking can be traced back to the views of Herder 
and von Humboldt in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It was most 
explicitly formulated, however, by the German-American linguist and an-
thropologist Edward Sapir in various publications from 1929 onward (re-
published posthumously in 1949 under the title Selected writings of Ed-
ward Sapir in language, culture and personality), and in the writings of his 
pupil Benjamin Lee Whorf (republished posthumously in 1956 as Lan-
guage, thought, and reality: Selected writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf). The 
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, as it came to be called, expresses the notion that 
different languages lead their speakers to different conceptualizations of the 
same extralinguistic reality, which seems to be most evident in the way that 
reality is segmented by the lexicon. 
Even though few linguists would fully agree with a strict reading of the 
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis today, it is generally accepted that a language, 
especially its lexicon, influences its speakers’ cultural patterns of thought 
and perception in various ways, for example through a culture-specific 
segmentation of the extralinguistic reality, the frequency of occurrence of