Phraseology and Culture in English

Corpus 
Destinations
Means of transport
LOB
Nice, London, Glasgow, Barcelona, Greece, Bu-
dapest, Berlin, British Isles 
train, rail, bus, sea, 
air
FLOB
Denmark, London, France, Spain, Hamburg, 
Peking, Hong Kong, Ecuador, New World 
bus, coach, train, air, 
ship
BNC
Europe, Western Europe, India, Alaska, New 
Zealand, Australia, South Africa 
car, air, flight, bus, 
coach, train 
Interestingly, the contexts of tourist/s and TRAVEL do not overlap in 
significant ways. Before the advent of mass tourism, most of the travelling 
was done by “travellers”, not by “tourists”. The difference between these 
two groups of people will be clarified shortly. In the LOB corpus, many 
contexts of the lemma TRAVEL still depict travelling as something spe-
cial, with the people travelling described as educated, often wealthy
7
.
Travelling is a facet of their sophistication, exploited to underline their 
social status. In these contexts, much stress is put on the degree of comfort 
(or luxury) in which the travelling can be done. Occasionally, the first 
lower-income holiday-makers are mentioned, who, for example, <travel
to Italy with their Lambretta>. The sense of commuting is not yet fre-
quent.
In the FLOB corpus, the majority of contexts, however, refer to travel-
ling just as movement from one place to another, occasionally in a meta-
phorical sense, such as light or particles travelling through space or matter. 
The concordances around people travelling in their free time ascribe them a 
certain seriousness. Very often, these travellers are depicted as searching 

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Andrea Gerbig and Angela Shek 
for some mind-broadening enlightenment, scholarly knowledge or cultural 
experience.
In the BNC, there is a mixture of collocations; on the one hand, travelling 
is to more exotic places for which e.g. vaccination/s are needed and, on the 
other hand, travelling is merely a necessary movement due to one’s job or 
profession, of whichever kind. Commuters and frequent travellers mean-
while have to live with <traffic jams, delays, queues> and related incon-
veniences.
Table 3 gives an overview of the people travelling, if this is specified in 
the concordance lines (very frequently, the actors are just anonymously ad-
dressed as “travellers” or “people”). As the table shows, the people who 
travel become more common or ordinary over the years. While travelling 
used to be expensive and time-consuming, it was mainly reserved for wealthy 
people, for those who could decide over their time freely and for officials 
whose costs of travelling were paid by an institution. This explains also 
why so many occurrences in LOB (and some in FLOB) show individually 
named travellers. Travelling was still something out of the ordinary. These 
days, everyone can travel, or maybe even has to travel on a regular basis. 
This increasing trend, in turn, might account for the fact that in the later 
data, travellers are mainly referred to as groups or masses, and hardly any-
more as individual people. 
Table 3. People who travel, according to LOB, FLOB and BNC.