Phraseology and Culture in English

3. Initial 
example 
“Tourism is still a form of colonisation, and our real holiday souvenir is, all 
too often, an attitude of superiority and control” (BNC). 
As an initial example, to briefly document the methodological procedure, 
the collocational profiles of tourist and tourists will be discussed. The con-
texts in which these two words occur in the LOB corpus display several 
evaluative meanings (in order of frequency): 
ʊ
Small, local business needs tourist money – there are only few occur-
rences of larger economic interests. 
ʊ
Local people are slightly weary of tourists, who, however, have to be 
humoured.
ʊ
The main attractions are historical and cultural sights. 
ʊ
Crime against tourists is still petty. 
In the FLOB corpus, the most frequent sets of collocates concern the fol-
lowing areas: 
ʊ
Mass tourism has established itself. There are numerous descriptions of 
tourists appearing in too large numbers <droves, swarms, clustered, in-
vading, sprawling, trampling, littering>.
ʊ
Crime against tourists is increasing, in numbers as in severity. 
ʊ
Tourists are identified as a major economic factor. Accordingly, infra-
structures are built and extended. 
ʊ
Issues of combining tourist interests and ecological protection are in-
creasingly discussed. 
In the BNC, the most prominent collocates are the following: 
ʊ
Negative evaluations increase, in relation to regions and sights being 
invaded by tourists, with detrimental effects 
sonal mass migration, swells, swelled, swelling tide, full of, sheer / 
large numbers, pressure, disturb, destroying customs and sights>.
ʊ
The only positive evaluations around tourist/s to be found concern their 
absence, i.e. if a place is free of tourists. 
ʊ
Historic sights are staged and cultural traditions and customs are acted 
out for tourists to visit and observe. In these contexts, tourists are often 

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Andrea Gerbig and Angela Shek 
represented as stupid enough not to perceive differences in quality and 
authenticity.
2
ʊ
Danger for tourists is mentioned regularly, with respect to both acci-
dents and crime. 
Although there is a diachronic development visible in the meaning cluster-
ing around tourist/s, as the three different corpora show, several basic as-
sumptions stay relatively similar over the years. It is obvious from all three 
data sources that tourist money is needed. The single tourist’s behaviour as 
such is mentioned astonishingly little. They are not perceived as individu-
als, but as types, categories and masses; not to be liked but to be dealt with. 
Initial curiosity towards a potentially interesting foreigner, occasionally 
visible in LOB, gives way over the years (as documented in FLOB and 
BNC) to a sedate weariness over the necessity to cater for and entertain 
tourists. But, in general, even people living on tourist money just groan and 
bear impositions. Frequencies of such perceived disturbances increase sig-
nificantly from LOB to BNC. The only “welcome” evaluations visible in 
the collocates of tourist/s concern commercial issues. 
Frequently, the inhabitants of a touristic region ridicule tourists who visit 
sights they themselves wouldn’t classify as a sight, such as other people’s 
workplace <the New York stock exchange, a farm, a building site, etc.>. 
MacCannell (1976) aptly describes the absurdity of the London sewage sys-
tem being marketed as a tourist attraction at the end of the 19th century. 
Individual attempts at ignoring “tourist attractions”, i.e. “leaving the beaten 
tracks” do not occur in the contexts of tourist/s, but rather with TRAVEL. 
If the above data document a certain recurrent discourse about tourists, 
we can probably conclude that people share certain schemata and concepts 
about the role of tourists in European / British culture. This is most easily 
visible in the following four sets of metaphorical representations around the 
nodes tourist/s:
ʊ
droves, swarm/s, trampling (tourists as animals) 
ʊ
invade, pervade, destroy, pressure (tourists as hostile / warriors) 
ʊ
sprawling, SWELL (masses of tourists are out of control) 
ʊ
crowds, mass migration, sheer / large numbers, full of (overwhelmed 
by masses of tourists) 
The negative evaluation given to tourist interference is framed in specific 
ways. While it is difficult to condemn individual people, their representa-

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The phraseology of tourism 
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tion as masses of animals, warriors or natural forces out of control relates to 
culturally shared schemata of things and situations to be avoided.