Phraseology and Culture in English

3. Colligation 
3.1. Overview 
Colligation is defined by Sinclair as “the co-occurrence of grammatical 
phenomena” (2004: 142) and has similarities with the “patterns” identified 
by Hunston and Francis (2000) and the “schemas” analyzed by Stubbs 
(2001). A first glance shows that the different types of recurrent syntactic 
structures, i.e. the colligational patterns of enjoy are not distributed equally 
across the two subcorpora of UK and US English, as shown in table 1 be-
low.
Without taking into account those structures which are too infrequent
to be representative, it looks as if there is a preference in the UK corpus
for the pattern enjoy + the + NP (41.9%), followed by enjoy + a/an +
NP (20.9%), enjoy + NP (20.3%), and enjoy + unpremodified NP (8.7%). 
In the US corpus, on the other hand, the most frequently used patterns
are enjoy + NP (35.3%), followed by enjoy + the + NP (26.5%), enjoy +
a/an + NP (14%) and enjoy + unpremodified NP (13.7%) (see figure 1 be-
low).
The first conclusion to be drawn from this comparison is that UK per-
suasive texts and specifically advertisements clearly favour definite noun 
phrases (the + NP), whereas in the US corpus premodified noun phrases 
without the definite article seem to be preferred. In order to explore the 
differences between the two corpora further, let us look at these colliga-
tional structures in more detail, focusing on their evaluative potential 
(which is, of course, the core function of the texts in the corpora: to evalu-
ate the advertised products positively).
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Enjoy!: The (phraseological) culture of having fun
113
Table 1. Colligational patterns
Pattern UK