Phraseology and Culture in English

4. Semantic 
preference 
4.1. Fun and profit
After examining in detail the colligational patterns of enjoy in the two cor-
pora we shall now comment on its semantic preference. This is defined 
here as a purely collocational phenomenon: the term semantic preference
refers to the (probabilistic) tendency of certain units of meaning to co-occur 
with items from the same semantic sub-set, “items which share a semantic 
feature, for example that they are all about, say, sport or suffering” (Sinclair 
2004: 142).
13
The term is thus employed to identify a specific kind of collo-
cation, and can easily be observed by extensive corpus analyses. For exam-
ple, suffer collocates with lexical items expressing illness, pain, or unpleas-
ant situations (cf. 
COBUILD
).
In order to identify the semantic preference of enjoy we have sorted all 
concordance lines according to the first right-hand collocate, i.e. the phe-
nomenon that we are told to enjoy. But note that what we are told to en- 
joy is often a series of things. In both sub-corpora, the majority of Phe-
nomena can then be grouped into four big categories: Food, Entertainment 
(music, theatre, games, sports, shopping …), Travel (trips, places, views, 
nature …) and Savings / Profits.
14
Some examples are given in the table 
below:

---

Enjoy!: The (phraseological) culture of having fun
123
Table 5. Semantic preference of enjoy
Food 
exico. Drive to Chihuahua. Enjoy a festive welcome dinner.
Hotel (US) 
t" hot and cold salad bar. Enjoy a lunch buffet Monday through (US) 
aticket Highway, Falmouth. Enjoy the very best pastries, gourmet and (US) 
E Cod village of Sandwich. Enjoy dinner for two for only $12.00 with (US) 
ship sailing at 18.00hrs. Enjoy a five-course dinner and then relax (UK) 
to a sumptuous meal and enjoy a drink in one of the 14 Sept (UK) 
best French cuisine and enjoy the finest wines. (UK) 
ompartment overnight and enjoy breakfast as we head north over (UK)