Phraseology and Culture in English

 
UK corpus (frequency 
• 2) US corpus (frequency • 3) 
adjectives
best, fine, pleasant
beautiful, best, delicious, full, free,
great, spectacular
nouns
scenery
dinner, music, ocean, ride, savings,
views, year
In both corpora the collocating adjectives tend to be evaluative, whereas the 
nouns tend to be non-evaluative. Additionally, some of the adjectives in the 
UK corpus seem less ‘intense’ (pleasant, fine) than the adjectives in the US 
corpus (great, spectacular).
6. 
The culture of 
enjoying
Our corpus analyses of Enjoy ...! have corroborated the thesis that grammar 
promotes the ideology of fun. Everything in the data embodies and pro-
claims the simple message: ‘having fun’ is good. The message is trans-
ferred to any act, event, state or thing that functions as the telic object of 
enjoy. And though the majority of examples in our corpora clearly belong 
to the category of ‘Things that can be enjoyed (according to our Western, 
ethnocentric ideology)’, the message is also attached to a few cases that, 
from a purely utilitarian point of view (breakfast, shopping), and maybe 
also from an extra-cultural perspective (your car life, BNC), can or should 
not be enjoyed. This is subtly achieved by increasingly delexicalizing en-
joy, a process which is assisted by recurrently using the verb in the same 
phrasal environments. The resulting stable expressions or phraseological 
items with their fixed syntax and invariable semantic content lead (or 
rather, have led) to a gradual entrenchment of the cultural pattern of having
fun as a natural and fundamental socio-cultural asset in US and UK cul-
tures. A further message that one gets from the analysis of the persuasive 
corpora as well as from personal encounters with the cultures involved, is 
that people have a legitimate claim and are by right entitled to have fun.
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The formulaic character of Enjoy!, which presupposes both a far-
reaching reduction of form and content (i.e. a delexicalization or semantic 
bleaching of the verb, as shown above), even warrants to talk of a prag-
matic idiom. Bazzanella characterizes pragmatic idioms as well as other 
“fixed syntagmas” as cases of “polyphonic repetition” (1993: 285). And 
indeed, like repeated items, such stable patterns of routine are mentioned

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Monika Bednarek and Wolfram Bublitz 
rather than used in that they echo tokens constituting a repertoire of ready-
made items typically used and expected in the genre given, here in persua-
sive texts. This also provides us with a new facet of enjoy and its related 
patterns: since addressees interpret texts against a background of inter-
textual expectations, they are familiar with the stock of routine forms regu-
larly used; writers of persuasive texts exploit this familiarity to coherently 
align current phenomena with the set of usually enjoyable phenomena. 
Conventionalized fixed expressions are thus (mis-)used to bind people to a 
process of re-conceptualization. They reduce the language users‘ options to 
choose. Pragmatic idioms and related highly routinized and fixed expres-
sions suggest one way of conceptualizing and simultaneously discard the 
possibility of an alternative choice. They are thus a crucial means of im-
plementing cultural concepts. 
Notes
1. This paper is based on corpus analyses undertaken at the University of Bir-
mingham by Monika Bednarek, who would like to thank the Department of 
English and the DAAD for their support as well as Collins for permitting use 
of the Bank of English. Some of the ideas expounded here were originally 
jointly developed with Uta Lenk. 
2. Other approaches are to study the (semantic) changes of lexical items in the 
history of the language or to contrast them with (allegedly) equivalent items 
in other languages (cf. Stubbs 2001: ch. 8; Wierzbicka 1997), which may or 
may not function as keywords indicating core cultural values (cf. also Edward 
Sapir’s related views quoted in Wierzbicka 1997: 1ff). 
3. Cf. Leech on the use of the imperative: “in proposing some action beneficial 
to h, s should bias the illocution towards a positive outcome, by restricting h’s
opportunity of saying ‘No’. Thus an imperative, which in effect does not al-
low h to say ‘No’ is … a positively polite way of making an offer” (Leech 
1983: 109). 
4. In an address at the University of Birmingham on March 16, 2004. 
5. The