On Speak With and Talk With: A Corpora-Based Analysis

Abstract

The main purpose of this article is to provide a comparative analysis of speak with and talk with in the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) and the Corpus of Contemporary Namkil Kang American English (COCA). With respect to the COHA, it is interesting to note that talk with was always preferred over speak with by Americans except 1820, 1830, and 1840. A further point to note is that speak with had the highest frequency (271 tokens) in 2010, whereas talk with had the highest frequency (633 tokens) in 1950. With respect to the COCA, it is worth pointing out that speak with and talk with show the same property in four genres, whereas they show a different property in the other four genres. Simply put, in the eight genres of the COCA, speak with is 50% the same as talk with. Talking about the distance between speak with and talk with, the former is the nearest to the latter in the web genre. Quite interestingly, the COCA shows that talk with people and speak with authority are the most widely used (126 tokens vs. 56 tokens) in America. Finally, this paper argues that 26.08% of forty six nouns are the collocations of speak with and talk with, thus revealing a low degree of similarity.