Phraseology and Culture in English

.uk
.au
.nz
.ie
.za
.edu
.us .ca 
good on you 
29
38
11
3
1
4
2 11 
good on him 
35
28
13
3
1
3
3 14 
fair enough 
44
21
3
3
2
11
7 9 
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. 

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Varieties of English around the world
449
Figure 4. Australian collocations peaking against baseline
Good on you/him is conspicuously over-represented in Australia and New 
Zealand and occurs at frequencies in the neutral span (Table 1) in the British 
sphere of influence, including – this time – Canada. It is underrepresented 
in the two US domains. At a figure of 44 per cent, fair enough is attested at 
the top end of the “neutral” frequency band for the .uk-domain. It is obvi-
ously underrepresented in the American data and overrepresented in the Aus-
tralian domain. In this variety, it may work as part of the lexical-semantic 
substrate of the spirit of good-natured egalitarian companionship which Anna 
Wierzbicka has described as the essence of Australian culture (cf. Wierz-
bicka 1986, 2001; and Ramson 2001 for a critique). 
4. Collocational correlates of naturalness and idiomaticity 
In a review of Biber et al.’s 1999 Longman Grammar, Edgar Schneider 
draws attention to the authors’ notion of “lexical bundles”,
9
“prefabricated 
verbal chunks, as it were, extended collocational patterns, regardless of their 
structural status” (Schneider 2001: 140), and goes on to say: 
This refers to sequences like I don’t know why, should be noted that, the rela-
tionship between the, come as a surprise, etc. These chunks will be of particu-
lar interest to scholars interested in grammaticalization, and also to readers 
of this journal [English World-Wide] because I suspect that nativization, the