Phraseology and Culture in English

3. Collocational aspects of “Britishness” 
A collocational profile of Britishness is an obvious point of departure for 
the present study. First, what little previous research there has been on col-
locational variability in world English has mostly been conducted on Brit-
ish and American English, and second, considering the crucial role of Brit-
ish English in the formation of many New Englishes, any future research to 
be conducted on collocational variability in the New Englishes will remain 
difficult to undertake until British English is described satisfactorily. 

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Varieties of English around the world
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In what follows, I will proceed in two stages. To assess the extent to 
which an investigation of subdomains of the English-language Web can yield 
valid results on regional variation in the use of collocations, I will compare 
distributional profiles of ten “neutral” collocations (i.e. collocations for which 
there is no reason to assume that their use varies across varieties) with those 
of selected further idioms and collocations whose status as regional markers 
is well-established. As the results of this comparison generally justify cau-
tious optimism about the value of the Web as corpus for the purpose at 
hand, I will then proceed to calculate profiles for further, hitherto neglected 
collocational indicators of Britishness. 
The ten neutral collocations comprise six of the “adjective + noun” type 
(deep breath, early age, biggest problem, coming year, bad luck, heavy rain)
and four of the “modifying adverb + participle/participial adjective” type 
(greatly exaggerated, wildly exaggerated, badly damaged, severely damaged).
Raw figures and percentages can be gleaned from Table I.1.2 in the Ap-
pendix. Table 1 below presents a neutral distributional baseline for colloca-
tions in the Web abstracted from the individual results. 
Table 1. Distribution* of a sample of ten “neutral” collocations in regional web 
domains