Great Versus Lovely: Stance Differences in American and British English

Abstract

This study compares stance marker frequencies, part of speech frequencies, and the most common stance markers in British and American conversations. The corpus is comprised of 100,000 words of spoken English taken from conversations at home in America and Great Britain, excerpted from the Longman Corpus of Spoken and Written English. Stance marker frequencies are generated through the computer program, StanceSearch, which automates the identification of stanced lexical items occurring in particular grammatical frames. Four categories of stance markers are examined: affect (marking emotion and attitude), evidentials (marking certainty, doubt, and commitment), amount (marking hedges and emphatics), and modality (modal verbs). Similarities are found in American and British conversations in stance category and part of speech use. There is a strong relationship between part of speech and stance category: affect is expressed with adjectives and verbs, amount is adverbial, and evidentials are verbal. The main differences are in lexical choice. The British conversations have lower frequencies than American conversations in emotion-expressing affect markers, first-person verbs which express emotive affect, and emphatics. The American conversations have lower frequencies for modals verbs. The results suggest that cultural variations are not based on differences in stance categories as a whole, but rather on subtle lexical differences. To pinpoint where cultural variation lies, these lexical differences must be examined more closely.