Phraseology and Culture in English

Bank of English is a general corpus of spoken and written English from 
Britain, US, Canada and Australia, which stood at 450 million words at the 
moment of the analysis. The British English subcorpora comprise texts from 
The New Scientist, The Sun / News of the World, The Guardian, The Econo-
mist, The Independent, The Times, BBC radio, business discourse, ephemera, 
magazines, books, and spoken discourse. The American English subcorpora 
include texts from academic books, ephemera, public radio, spoken discourse, 
books and newspapers. 

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Enjoy!: The (phraseological) culture of having fun
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6. This highlights the problem that even an extremely large corpus such as the 
Bank of English is not large enough when looking at genre dependent or rela-
tively rare linguistic phenomena. Incidentally, enjoy in all its senses and word 
forms (enjoy, enjoys, enjoyed, enjoying) is most frequent in these ephemera 
subcorpora. The frequent usage of enjoy! in these texts probably relates to the 
IMAGINE function of advertisements identified by Stöckl (1997: 74) where 
the recipient imaginatively experiences the future resulting from his/her ac-
quisition of the advertised product(s). Furthermore, the usage of imperatives 
is “the generic sentence type for the ad […], because all ads are urging us to 
some action” (Myers 1994: 47). However, it must also be pointed out that 
“advertisers use commands, not because telling you to do something really 
makes you do what they say, but because it will create a personal effect, a 
sense of one person talking to another” (Myers 1994: 47). On the diachronic 
development of imperatives and directives in advertisements see Gieszinger 
(2001: 106f, 220ff). 
7. I.e., 
enjoy + noun phrase with predeterminer, determiner (other than definite / 
indefinite article), premodifer (adjective, -s genitive, noun) etc. 
8. On evaluation and patterning see Hunston and Sinclair (2000) and on evalua-
tion in general compare the contributions to Hunston and Thompson (2000) 
and Bednarek (2004). 
9. The analysis of evaluative and non-evaluative meaning is always subjective to 
a large extent, as there is a cline between evaluative and non-evaluative mean-
ing. However, there does not seem to be a methodological antidote to this 
problem. We have included intensifying adjectives (full, complete, whole) as 
evaluative.
10. Some of the structures with the indefinite article in fact make up phrasal 
quantifiers (e.g. a cup of, a plate of). An analysis of these was beyond the 
scope of this paper, but might yield some interesting results. 
11. Cf. Channell (1994) on the potential communicative effects of vague numbers. 
12. Comparing the occurrences for the first and second person pronouns I, me,
mine, my, myself, you, yours, your, yourself/yourselves, we, us, ours, our, our-
selves in the US and UK ephemera subcorpora, this hypothesis is confirmed: 
the overall frequency of such pronouns is higher in the US corpus (31,705.5 
per million compared to 28,616.1 per million), even though some pronouns 
are more frequent in the UK corpus (I, we, myself, yourself/selves, ourselves).
13. Compare also Hunston’s definition of semantic prosody: “Briefly, a word 
may be said to have a particular semantic prosody if it can be shown to co-
occur typically with other words that belong to a particular semantic set” 
(Hunston 1995: 137). Although she employs the term semantic prosody here, 
this definition corresponds closely to Sinclair’s definition of semantic prefer-
ence. In fact, there are several competing and overlapping terms used for this 
phenomenon: semantic prosody (Louw 1993; Stubbs 1995; Bublitz 1996, 

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Monika Bednarek and Wolfram Bublitz 
1998; Hoey 2000; Hunston 2002), evaluative polarity (Channell 2000), and 
semantic association (Hoey 2003), although these terms are sometimes em-
ployed to refer only to the co-occurrence of lexical items with negative and 
positive lexical items, and frequently include the notion of connotation (which 
is specifically excluded in our definition of semantic preference).
14. However, it was sometimes difficult to classify the phenomena that were 
mentioned, as there is a cline especially between the travel and entertainment 
categories. A minority of phenomena do not fall into either of these four cate-
gories, e.g. enjoy a long lie-in; enjoy the fragrance; enjoy total peace of mind.
15. But remember that games, sports etc. are included in the entertainment cate-
gory, although they may well relate to the travel category at times. 
16. The rhetorical effect of using enjoy with reference to concepts which even in 
Western cultures are not something you usually enjoy, is some sort of sar-
casm, cynicism or irony (in accordance with what has been suggested for se-
mantic prosody by Louw 1993). Compare the following example from the 
Guardian subcorpus of the Bank of English, which is part of a review of 
Channel 4’s Psychos: “I certainly didn’t believe in Dr Kelly when he took Dr 
Nash to see a woman who’d just come in with slashed wrists: ‘We treat for 
you, darling. You’re going to love this. Haven’t seen one of these in ages. 
(Janet Brown the unhappy woman), enjoy.’ Shocking, sure. But real? Surely 
not.” 
17. See the help page of Wordsmith Tools (Scott 1999) for these quotations. The 
corpus that is taken as a basis for the following cluster analysis consists only 
of the concordance lines filtered out through the manual analysis (rather than 
the whole UK and US ephemera corpora). 
18. The cluster does not occur in the spoken AE corpus, in the AE book corpus, 
in the AE academic book corpus, in AE public radio discourse, in BE busi-
ness discourse and in the Economist.
19. Here, the use of Enjoy! is reminiscient of the use of Rejoice! in religious texts, 
which as an imperative is equally unusual from a semantic and pragmatic 
point of view.