Phraseology and Culture in English

 .uk
.au
.nz
.ie
.za
.edu
.us 
.ca 
GET to first base 
20
29
3
1
1
27
5 15 
NOT get to first base 
12
29
2
1
2
16
8 16 
real good 
25
9
3
1
2
29
18 15 
NB: CAPITALISED forms include figures for morphological variants. Percentages 
sometimes do not add up to precisely 100 due to rounding. * stands for attestations 
amounting to percentages < 1. 
Figure 2. American collocations peaking against baseline 
These figures are clearly not strong enough to refute current assumptions 
about the “American” quality of these expressions, all the more as at least 
in the case of real good the assumption can be backed by solid evidence 
from closed corpora (see Biber et al. 1999: 545). What they seem to indi-
cate is that there is much American linguistic input in other national
web-domains, and that the “Web-corpus” is therefore least suited to iso-
late what is specifically American. But as the aim of the present study is 
to use the web to establish collocational profiles of Britishness, this limi-
tation is, of course, not crucial. From a large number of collocations in-
vestigated, the following table presents a number which in works of
reference or the linguistic literature have not been identified as typical- 
ly British but whose distribution resembles that of the well-estab- 
lished Briticisms reported in Table 2. In these cases, the Web data could 
Distribution of selected American idioms/ 
collocations on the Web 
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
.uk
.edu
.au
.ca
.us
.nz
.ie
.za
real good
GET to first base
NOT get to first base
neutral/ baseline

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Varieties of English around the world
447