Phraseology and Culture in English

Christian Mair 
the construction a prime indicator of register and style. Here are some typi-
cal examples from the British National Corpus: 
The summer holidays that year saw me at my most apathetic – and my most 
miserable. (BNC A0F 569) 
This year saw the completion of 45 quality 2 and 3 bedroomed homes in 
picturesque Bampton on the fringe of the Cotswolds by Stanley Hugh Leach. 
(BNC AAY 353) 
Last year saw half of privately-held Tivoli’s revenues come from sales of 
Tivoli Works, the framework, toolkits and services. (BNC CMY 111) 
The use of see with a secondary or derived subject illustrated in the above 
example is not the only structure of this type. Semantically redundant uses 
of see are also found in less register-specific and less conventionalised con-
structions of the following kind: 
As one group member said: “What I’d like to see happening is this room set 
up with the computer and using it regularly to type up the notes from our 
meetings.” (BNC FPJ 1390) 
This is what I would also like to see happen throughout Great Britain, with 
devolution and regional assemblies. (BNC K52 4443) 
But even so, ’s point is a good one, that there isn’t, there’s seldom 
if ever enough 
 this is a small problem in psychoanalysis, I myself 
hope to put right to some extent, and some of you may live long enough to 
see this happen, I hope you will. (BNC HUN 523) 
In none of these examples is the semantic notion of visual, or even intel-
lectual, perception essential to the utterance. The following would thus
be satisfactory paraphrases of the mere propositional content of the cita-
tions:
What I’d like to happen is for this room to be set up with the computer and 
for [me?/us?] to use it regularly to type up the notes from our meetings. 
This is what I would also like to happen throughout Great Britain, with de-
volution and regional assemblies. 
This is a small problem in psychoanalysis, I myself hope to put [it] right to 
some extent, and some of you may live long enough for this to happen, I 
hope you will. 
The BNC data suggests that, unlike the preceding presentational structure, 
this one is also common in spoken English, but unfortunately even this very 

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Varieties of English around the world
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large corpus yields insufficient material to investigate such forms system-
atically.
12
However, provided that one is willing to look at large numbers of in-
stances of see (and its morphological variants sees, saw, seen and seeing)
and sift the evidence manually, it is possible to obtain sufficient data even 
from the relatively small (c. 1 million words) corpora of the International 
Corpus of English (ICE), a project designed to provide generically and sty-
listically stratified matching samples of national varieties of English.
13
For 
the present study the press sections of the currently available six national 
ICE components were investigated, which comprise c. 60,000 words each. 
The target of the search was defined as any form of see governing a depend-
ent non-finite clause in which the literal meanings of perception or cogni-
tion were not dominant. Thus, a sentence such as we saw him run a good 
race would have been excluded, while we don’t want to see inflation rise
would have been included. Obvious cases for inclusion were the correspond-
ing structures in which the subject of see was inanimate, and hence incapa-
ble of either visual perception or cognition, such as last year saw inflation 
rise to new heights. For the British material, this left a total of eight very 
clear cases, which are listed below: 
Though he is keen to see the matter debated, he is clearly in no hurry to see 
the Bank of England’s supervisory responsibilities passed to a pan-European 
institution. (ICE-GB, press W2C-005) 
While councillor Richard Harrod, who has represented the estate on the coun-
cil for five years, said the community had been pleased to see the police act 
and regarded it as important that they had worked closely with other agen-
cies […] (ICE-GB, press W2C-011) 
Stephen Bierley sees Newcastle United selling themselves (ICE-GB, press 
W2C-004) 
Long-suffering holders in Ferranti International saw the shares sink to a new 
low of 9 ½ p as a line of 3.5m went through at 8 ½ p in what seemed to be a 
bed and breakfast deal […](ICE-GB, press W2C-012) 
Last year was one of the most depressing on record for the US corporate 
sector, which saw its credit-worthiness plummet to alarming new lows. (ICE-
GB, press W2C-013) 
Throughout the past decade, he has been buying armaments and fortifica-
tions from Western countries eager both to see him defeat the fundamental-
ists in Iran and to take his cash. (ICE-GB, press W2E-001) 

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