Phraseology and Culture in English

enjoy
1 enjoy enjoys enjoying enjoyed 
 
If 
you 
enjoy
something, you find pleasure and satisfaction in doing or 
experiencing it. 
Ross had always enjoyed the company of women. 
He was a guy who enjoyed life to the full. 
I enjoyed playing cricket. 
VB
2 enjoy enjoys enjoying enjoyed
If 
you 
enjoy
yourself, you do something that you like doing or you take 
pleasure in the situation that you are in. 
I must say I am really enjoying myself at the moment.
VB 
3 enjoy enjoys enjoying enjoyed 
If 
you 
enjoy
something such as a right, benefit, or privilege, you have it. 
(FORMAL) 
The average German will enjoy 40 days' paid holiday this year. 
He enjoys a reputation for honesty. 
VB 
Some of the ‘service’ examples of enjoy in the travel category are prob-
ably also employed in sense 3. However, it is not always unequivocally 
clear whether enjoy is used in sense 1 or in sense 3, as there seems to be
a cline of meaning involved. Let us look at these dictionary definitions
in more detail. As far as their colligational patterns are concerned, enjoy 2
is clearly different from both enjoy 1 and enjoy 3, whereas enjoy 1 and en-
joy 3 in fact share one pattern, namely Vn (verb followed by a noun 
phrase):

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Monika Bednarek and Wolfram Bublitz 
enjoy 1
: Vn, V-ing, V it when / if, general it as object 
enjoy 2
: V pron-refl 
enjoy 3
: Vn 
(Francis et al. 1996) 
Perhaps this pattern-sharing is one possible explanation for the cline in 
meaning from enjoy 1 to enjoy 3. From the data we know that there are 
only two types of phenomena that are enjoyed: those that people can do,
and those that people can have. As to the first type (sense 1 and, to a certain 
extent, sense 2 in 
COBUILD
), it is evident that when we say that people en-
joy a state or event (or even a thing), we do not mean that they enjoy them 
as such (i.e., as states etc.) but that they enjoy doing them as in enjoy danc-
ing or fishing. In those examples in which the act is not encoded in the form 
of the object (as with the gerunds dancing or fishing), we have to supple-
ment an action verb in order to specify the way the subject participates in 
the state or event denoted by the object. Hence, to enjoy pastries or wine is
to enjoy eating pastries or drinking wines, to enjoy a book or music is to 
enjoy reading a book or listening to music, and to enjoy the beach or scen-
ery is to enjoy visiting / staying at the beach or looking at the scenery. In 
this reading of enjoy, people are actively engaged in an act or performance. 
The phenomena they enjoy are not per se enjoyable, nor passively given as 
enjoyable, but are being actively turned into something enjoyable. Phe-
nomena of the second type (sense 3 in 
COBUILD
), on the other hand, seem 
to be enjoyable per se; if you enjoy savings you do not have to do some-
thing other than having savings (or benefiting from them). Enjoy is delexi-
calized in this much more passive sense, which, incidentally, can be applied 
to almost any object that people can own or possess. 
The distinction between senses 1 and 2 and sense 3 is often indetermi-
nate; we can observe a cline from the ‘pleasure-in-doing’ meaning to the 
‘pleasure-in-having’ meaning. We would like to argue that this indetermi-
nacy between the active and the passive reading of enjoy is exploited by
the persuasion industry in general and the advertising industry in particu-
lar. Accordingly, by telling people that they can enjoy something it is sub-
tly insinuated that (by enjoying it) they can and will have it (or profit from
it). There is a clear shift from an act (of doing) to a state (of having) with 
the additional effect that the ideology of doing something for fun and 
pleasure is transferred to and encompasses objects or assets: it is fun to 
have something. Thus, due to pattern-sharing, the strong sense of enjoy-
ment connected with the act of doing something ‘rubs off’ or is transferred 

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Enjoy!: The (phraseological) culture of having fun
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to the delexicalised and accordingly only weakly evaluative (or even neu-
tral) sense of having something.
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