British English/American English Grammar: Convergence in Writing – Divergence in Speech?

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.