Phraseology and Culture in English

Distribution of collocational Australianisms on the 
Web
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10
20
30
40
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.uk
.edu
.au
.ca
.us
.nz
.ie
.za
good on you
good on him
fair enough
neutral/ baseline

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Christian Mair 
emergence of structural characteristics of New Englishes, operates (amongst 
other things) through the emergence of specific co-occurrences of this type. 
(2001: 140) 
Of course, it is worthwhile to look for collocational patterns which identify 
a particular New English and set it off against established varieties or other 
New Englishes. In the present investigation, however, I would like to fol-
low a slightly different tack and look at some collocational patterns which 
are common to a large number of natively spoken varieties of English but 
largely absent from learner or foreign-language English. It is certainly worth-
while to investigate the use or non-use of such collocations in institutional-
ised second- or official-language varieties of English. In doing so, several 
possible results might be expected: 
(a) 
Second-language varieties pattern with the natively spoken ones, 
because of the long period of contact with natively spoken English 
and the institutionalisation of English in the relevant communities. 
(b) 
Second-language varieties pattern with foreign-language ones be-
cause fully natural and idiomatic use of collocations cannot be ex-
pected in any learned variety, regardless of the degree of institution-
alisation of English in the community. 
(c) 
Different second-language varieties show different patterns, because 
the stability of local norms, and their closeness to or distance from 
native-speaker norms are variable from community to community. 
Minor fossilizations apart, the English of advanced learners tends to be gram-
matically correct and usually displays a rich and differentiated vocabulary. 
However, it is very rare for advanced learners to produce text that is fully 
natural or idiomatic, and it is reasonable to assume that collocations play a 
major role in accounting for this gap between correctness and naturalness. 
Collocational profiles of natively spoken varieties of English seem to be at 
once more complex and more focussed
10
than those of learner ones. For sec-
ond-language institutionalised varieties of English, collocational patterns 
might provide language-internal criteria for assessing the degree of natural-
ness and stability of usage norms they display. 
To show how such an assessment might be undertaken, I will investigate 
secondary grammatical uses of the highly frequent verb see. As a lexical 
verb, see exhibits complex polysemy, with the three main focal meanings be-
ing “(involuntary/subconscious) visual perception”, “understand” and “visit”. 
In addition, see has developed several conventionalised grammatical uses 

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Varieties of English around the world
451
through processes of grammaticalisation, for example in the complex con-
junction seeing (that) (see OED entry for the historical development of the 
various uses and Alm-Arvius 1993 for a synchronic survey). The focus of 
the present investigation will be neither on the fully lexical nor on the con-
ventionalized grammatical uses just sketched, but on a diffuse middle 
ground which has not been paid sufficient attention to in previous studies. 
Uses I will be concerned with in particular are, for example, illustrated in 
the following passage: 
The World Trade Center atrocity saw Orion head honcho Anthony “Fatty” 
Cheetham displaying the tact and sensitivity for which he is renowned. 
(Private Eye 1037, 21 Sept. 2001, p. 25) 
The constituent order of this sentence is not a very direct mapping of the 
semantic proposition. Thus, the sentence can be regarded as being derived 
from an underlying propositional structure which can informally be para-
phrased as follows: 
On the occasion of the World Trade Center atrocity Orion head honcho An-
thony “Fatty” Cheetham displayed the tact and sensitivity for which he is 
renowned.
If we wish to include the verb see as part of the underlying proposition, the 
paraphrase is: 
On the occasion of the World Trade Center atrocity we [or some unspeci-
fied agent] saw Orion head honcho Anthony “Fatty” Cheetham displaying the 
tact and sensitivity for which he is renowned. 
Regardless of which underlying proposition one adopts, one thing is clear. 
The use of see is not motivated by semantic considerations but merely serves 
to reorganise the syntactic constituent order and the information structure 
of the sentence. The use of see is thus grammatical, diathetic, comparable 
in function to devices such as the passive or the mediopassive. The differ-
ence is that these last-named diathetic strategies are grammaticalised to a 
high degree, whereas the use of see in diathesis is a moderately convention-
alised stylistic option in present-day English.
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The most common type of subject in presentational structures of this 
type is represented by temporal expressions such as yesterday or last year.
Indeed, collocations such as yesterday saw or […] year saw are frequent 
enough to allow analysis in the BNC. Year saw, for example, occurs 60 
times, with all examples from written sources only, which, in addition to its 
being an indicator of idiomatic, natural or native-like language-use, makes 

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