Phraseology and Culture in English

Distribution of collocational Briticisms on the Web
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
.uk
.edu
.au
.ca
.us
.nz
.ie
.za
CANNOT be bothered
surely that's
get a life
surely that is
neutral/ baseline
be said to provide the empirical proof. At a future stage, analysis of
collocations could be at least partially automatised, so that the analysis
of collocations in web-data would constitute a genuine discovery proce-
dure, revealing variety-specific distributions beyond the analyst’s initial 
hunches:
Table 4. Distribution of previously undocumented collocational markers of British-
ness on the Web (figures = rounded percentages)
.uk
.au
.nz
.ie
.za
.edu
.us .ca 
CANNOT be bothered 
64
14
3
2
1
7
4 4 
surely that is 
52
19
1
8
2
9
2 7 
surely that’s 
62
14
2
1
1
9
1 10 
get a life 
54
11
4
2
4
12
7 7 
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 3 visualises the variety-specific peaks of typically British usage against 
the average baseline from Table 1/Figure 1: 
Figure 3. British collocations peaking against baseline

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448
Christian Mair 
Note that one of the “British” usages, surely that is, also peaks in Austra-
lian and Irish English. Whether – given the risks of interpreting web-based 
usage statistics – these two minor peaks should be regarded as representing 
a genuine linguistic fact or as mere statistical noise, remains an open ques-
tion.
The overwhelming concentration of CANNOT be bothered in the British 
material establishes as a fact what the figures from closed corpora merely 
suggest.
6
The figures for surely that is / surely that’s are also robust evidence 
that this particular strategy of verbal emphasis is not very common outside 
the British sphere of influence.
7
The most interesting Briticism in Table 4, 
however, is get a life. The OED entry (s.v. life n.) defines this idiom as “to 
adopt a more worthwhile and meaningful lifestyle, esp. by making new ac-
quaintances or developing new interests, or by abandoning pointless or soli-
tary pursuits” and attests it from 1983. All the early citations are from Ameri-
can sources, with a first British attestation for 1994.
8
The current distribu-
tion therefore shows that (a) the originally American idiom spread into other 
varieties extremely fast and (b) its popularity may by now be on the wane 
in the originating variety. 
Table 5 shows that the web-based documentation of collocational vari-
ability also has some potential for the description of Australian English. The 
benchmark for Australianness is provided by the values for good on you/ 
him, which are known collocational markers of Australian and New Zea-
land English and recorded as such in the OED (with attestations from 1914 
onwards – cf. s.v. good). An interesting case is fair enough, which was 
originally included among the putative collocational Briticisms on account 
of a comparison of frequencies in the BNC (500, of which 179 from the 
spoken-demographic material) and the Longman Corpus of Spoken Ameri-
can English (5). Figure 4 visualises the distribution: 
Table 5. Distribution of collocational markers of Australianness on the Web (fig-
ures = rounded percentages)