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British English/American English Grammar: Convergence in Writing – Divergence in Speech?
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Christian Mair
Veröffentlicht/Copyright:
3. Februar 2009
Abstract
Investigating two well-known instances of British-American lexico-grammatical differences, namely (1) variable prepositional usage after different and (2) the use of must and its alternatives as expressions of deontic and epistemic modality, the present study demonstrates that British and American standard English may differ quite considerably in speech in areas in which they resemble each other closely in writing. While it has been a long-established truism in variation studies to point out that “accent divides, and syntax unites”, recent developments in the compilation of English-language corpora and corpus-linguistic techniques allow us to study the register-specific aspects of regional variability in standard English at levels of delicacy and systematicity unattainable in previous research. It emerges that, in contrast to accent, where there are two clearly distinct British and American standards of pronunciation, the grammar of the two varieties is composed of one common underlying system of options for which speakers in different communities or contexts have different statistical preferences. There is, thus, one English standard grammar, with different (British, American, etc.) ways of using it.
Published Online: 2009-02-03
Published in Print: 2007-August
© Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen 2007
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- Spoken Styles of Present-Day English: An Introduction
- Adolescent Intonation in Canada: Talk Units in In-group Conversations
- The Style of Pop Song Lyrics: A Corpus-linguistic Pilot Study
- Genre Matters: Textual and Contextual Constraints on Contemporary English Speech Behaviour
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- Simone Müller, Discourse Markers in Native and Non-native English Discourse
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- Hans Frede Nielsen, From Dialect to Standard: English in England 1154–1776. A Journey through the History of the English Language in England and America. Vol. II
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