Phraseology and Culture in English

hang-gliding, rapids-and waterfalls-viewing, walking, climbing>.
While immersed in these activities, people expect the following experience: 
ʊ
fun, ADVENTURE, EXCITING, EXPLORE, beautiful>.
They want to stay in facilities such as: 
ʊ
<luxury hotels, best cabin, gracious surrounding, warm hospitality>.
The choices of thematically specified weekend packages cater for the most 
varied interests: 
ʊ
<hen-(night / weekend), bridal weekend, chocolate-lovers weekend pack-
age>.

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This culture of a “mini-break”
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shows in its collocational patterns strong 
links to a middle-aged, professional, slightly higher-income clientele. Com-
paratively speaking, weekend packages are more expensive than longer 
holidays and require more effort and general mobility on the part of the 
traveller. But still, package holidays, even if they seem to be adventurous 
and maybe even strenuous, are a kind of convenience product, to be con-
sumed in a ready-made, planned and organised way. 
This concept of a package holiday goes along with a trend in society to 
buy easy-to-consume, ready-made products. In cooking, this goes as far as 
pouring ready-made cake dough from a plastic pack into a baking mould to 
put it into the oven. You can retain the satisfaction of a freshly baked cake 
out of your own oven, without the hassle of preparing anything yourself. 
Equally, large parts of the do-it-yourself market are saturated with pre-
fabricated products that fit into the tight time schedule of the consumers, 
who still want to say they worked it out themselves. 
An analysis of the related key-expression ready-made shows that its 
overall frequencies are not significantly different in LOB, FLOB and 
BNC. Out of the total occurrences, those referring to convenience products 
such as food, clothing and furniture related elements, however, illustrate 
interesting differences in the representation of the concept. In LOB, these 
are approximately a third of all occurrences and they are framed in a very 
critical way, preferring hand-made products. While in FLOB, the percent-
age of occurrences is similar to LOB, the representations, in contrast, are 
overall positive, praising the convenience of ready-made products for con-
sumers. In the BNC, the relevant percentage of ready-made is almost half 
of the total occurrences. We find a mixture of evaluations here: first of all, 
the amount of ready-made products has risen so steadily because people 
want and need them. Their quality is regularly praised while time effi-
ciency is presupposed and therefore hardly explicitly mentioned. Without 
a substantial amount of the available ready-made produce, it seems hardly 
possible any more to handle our ordinary contemporary live. However, an 
astonishingly high proportion of the concordance lines around the node 
indicate more or less severe criticism directed towards ready-made prod-
ucts and the accompanying life style. In the field of nutrition, issues of 
health and pleasure in consuming fresh, hand/home-made products are dis-
cussed. In connection with other products, aspects of quality and original-
ity, extraordinariness and natural beauty appear. Overall, there is a dis-
course prosody visible in this percentage of critical evaluations, emphas-
ising the intrinsic value perceived in products which are not pre-processed. 

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The phraseology of tourism 
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In particular in the field of food, a strong aspect of quality and sophisti-
cation is implied, coupled with snobbish ridiculing of convenience food 
consumers. 
Coming back to package holidays as one among the vast array of con-
venience products, they are described as a form of “New Tourism”. This 
term indicates a variety of tourisms that emerge from what is referred to as 
the mainstream or conventional mass tourism. It closely relates to new types 
of consumers (the so called new middle class), and post-Fordism, a new form 
of economic organisation or mass production and consumption (Rojek and 
Urry 1997). 
Practices of mass consumption concerning travel products are among 
the major cultural shifts in contemporary society.
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Package holidays repre-
sent a change of convention, that is, consumption of services (cf. “ready-
made”) rather than goods, across a new horizon of lifestyles and activities. 
Products are produced that are in need of demands. Package holidays are 
created to serve consumer needs, offering different lifestyles for different 
people.
Parallel to the unbroken trend of cheap and good-value package holi-
days at not too far away beaches is, since the 1970s, a heightened interest 
that is visible in a growing market for (what seems to be a contradiction in 
terms) “individualized” package holidays, e.g. visiting a museum in Paris,
going to an opera in Rome, attending a concert in Moscow, white-water-
rafting in Canada, fasting and walking in Tuscany, etc.… These tours are 
still highly organised and standardised. Everybody can find their conven-
ient product (even sex-holidays in Thailand, cf. Houellebecq 2003). How-
ever, people do not want to be stereotyped and put into categories, even if 
they act like it. The following extracts pick up this mood precisely: 
ʊ
<But most of all she loved the fact that it wasn’t full of sun-seeking 
OAPs on tours. She knew it was snobbish, that she was just like any 
other package holiday-maker> (BNC). 
ʊ
<from the lone backpacker who stuffs a volume of Descartes into the 
pocket of her shorts and forgets to take spare socks, to the package 
holidaymaker who packs a change of silk shirt for every evening he is 
going to be away> (BNC). 
These days, our average working hours are considerably fewer than in the 
early 1960s. We work less on a daily and weekly basis and have more 
holidays at our disposal. There is a weird mixture of discourse about bore-

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Andrea Gerbig and Angela Shek 
dom and lack of excitement on the one hand and stress and burnout syn-
dromes on the other hand. Package holidays cater for both moods – recrea-
tion and adventure. People can <find their inner self, discover their abili-
ties, become a new you> or just <flee from reality, be away from home, 
travel away from stress>. This illustrates socio-culturally accepted values 
of liberation from the routines of one’s life and to be <free from social 
constraints>. Such notions of escapism frame wishes of temporarily be-
coming someone else entirely or just to float in “sweet oblivion”. To be 
able to do this, package holiday-makers, however, gladly accept the struc-
tures and strictures of the organisers, the tour itinerary and the rules of the 
resort. In the contexts of TRAVEL, where the travellers have to take care 
of the organisational frame themselves, there are hardly any occurrences 
of such issues of “freedom”. 
We can see mutually supportive effects in the analysis of package holi-
day. It is of course not possible to say which came first: Some desire to 
spend one’s leisure time in a certain way, or a marketing idea and strategy. 
But we can investigate how certain language uses and the respective ideas 
developed over time. We can check this quantitatively with diachronic cor-
pus research and qualitatively with regard to the particular sets of colloca-
tional patterns and their distributions and changes. Today, a package holi-
day is a fairly clearly delimited concept in Western affluent society, with 
fairly clearly delimited sets of connotations. There are opposing representa-
tions, trying to reclaim semantic ground for package holidays, but they are, 
statistically speaking, not successful enough in construing alternative views 
in the language users.