Phraseology and Culture in English

5. Collocation 
The third phenomenon of co-selection examined in this paper is colloca-
tion, the co-occurrence of lexical items. Here we will look at lexical clus-
ters involving enjoy as well as at its most frequent right-hand collocates. 
5.1. Clusters 
The term cluster refers to ‘words which are found repeatedly in each 
other’s company’ (similar to the definition of collocation), but clusters “re-
present a tighter relationship than collocates”, and allow the researcher “to 
see patterns of repeated phraseology” in concordances.
17
The results of an 
analysis of clusters involving enjoy with the help of Wordsmith Tools 
(Scott 1999) are as follows: 
Table 6. Clusters 
UK ephemera 
US ephemera 
N cluster 
Freq. 
N cluster 
Freq. 
1 and enjoy the 
34 
1 
and enjoy the
29
2 and enjoy a 
21 
2 relax and enjoy 
9
3 or enjoy the 
8 
3 and enjoy a 
8
4 relax and enjoy 
7 
4 come and enjoy 
6
5 along and enjoy 
4 
5 and enjoy our 
4
6 come along and 
4 
6 enjoy all the 
4
7 and enjoy it 
3 
7 today and enjoy 
4
8 back and enjoy 
3 
8 and enjoy # 
3
9 sit back and 
3 
9 and enjoy all 
3
10 enjoy a whole 
3
11 enjoy all of 
3
12 enjoy the beautiful 
3
13 enjoy the best 
3

---

128
Monika Bednarek and Wolfram Bublitz 
In both corpora, the aforementioned frequent pattern and enjoy is reflected 
in the cluster findings. Persuasive texts and, in particular, advertisements 
seem to tell us to do X and enjoy Y, with the enjoyment being presented as 
a consequence of an action related to the advertised product. Instantiations 
of this are relax and enjoy, come (along) and enjoy, and sit back and enjoy.
Relax and enjoy is a cluster found in both corpora, and does not seem to 
be restricted to ephemera texts, either. Looking up the pattern relax and 
enjoy in the Bank of English (without distinguishing between imperative 
and other usages of enjoy) we find 269 occurrences, most of which admit-
tedly occur in the ephemera subcorpora (UK ephemera corpus: 4.7 per mil-
lion words; US ephemera corpus: 4.5 per million words), but the pattern 
also occurs in British magazines (1.6 per million words), and in all other 
subcorpora from the Bank of English apart from The New Scientist, The
Economist and UK business. 
In contrast, the cluster come and enjoy (50 occurrences in the Bank of 
English) is much more frequent in American English than in British Eng-
lish. Most occurrences are in fact in the US news and ephemera subcorpora, 
and there is a much bigger difference between the frequency in the US 
ephemera corpus (1.7 per million words) and in the UK ephemera corpus 
(0.65 per million words) than with the cluster relax and enjoy.
18
This is 
reflected in the above finding that come and enjoy does not appear in the 
cluster analysis for the UK corpus. However, come along and enjoy seems 
to exist as an alternative. Overall, this is not a frequent pattern, but it ap-
pears to be more characteristic of British English than of American English: 
although there are only nine occurrences of come along and enjoy in the 
Bank of English, none of them occur in the American English subcorpora. 
The cluster findings also reflect the greater frequency of and enjoy and 
or enjoy in the UK subcorpus (see above), and the aforementioned prefer-
ence of enjoy + all in the US subcorpus, as well as the tendency of enjoy to 
co-occur with specific evaluative premodifiers in the US corpus (enjoy the 
beautiful, enjoy the best) (see below). 
5.2. Collocates 
Looking at frequent right-hand lexical collocates of enjoy (especially at 
position R1 and R2) (ignoring the tendencies that have already been ob-
served), we find that the two corpora prefer different adjectives and nouns 
as collocates: 

---

Enjoy!: The (phraseological) culture of having fun
129
Table 7. Collocates of enjoy