What a freak paper this is: Noun to adjective transitions of freak in British and American English

Reviewed by: American and British English: Divided by a Common Language? by Paul Baker, and: The Prodigal Tongue: The Love-Hate Relationship Between American and British English by Lynne Murphy Orin Hargraves (bio) American and British English: Divided by a Common Language?, by Paul Baker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. xiii + 264. $24.99 (paperback). ISBN: 978-1-107-46088-1. The Prodigal Tongue: The Love-Hate Relationship Between American and British English, by Lynne Murphy. New York: Penguin Books, 2018. Pp. 360. $17.00 (paperback). ISBN: 978-0-1431-3110-6 (also published in the U.K. by Oneworld Publications). The differences between the varieties of English spoken in the United States and the United Kingdom have been remarked on since colonial times. In public discourse, it’s a regular trope of journalists and columnists to remark on differences, often as a pretext for some other agenda. At the scholarly level, articles, papers, and books have been written to address diverse aspects of these dialectal differences and what they mean or portend. Many past and current DSNA members are among the contributors to this genre: John Algeo, Richard Bailey, Carol-June Cassidy, Edward Finegan, Paul Heacock, and myself, to name a few. Now two new books have appeared in this genre, and they are as different as chalk and cheese, to use a decidedly British expression. STILL DIFFERENT AFTER ALL THESE YEARS Paul Baker, a professor at Lancaster University in England, has written American and British English: Divided by a Common Language? It is a much more technically oriented book than the title might suggest; those who geek out on corpus statistics and the arcane ways in which they can be wrung from data will find much to examine in his book. Baker sets out to determine “to what extent are British and American English different, in what ways, and how have these differences altered over the last 100 years” (3). His approach to these questions is constrained by the data he examines, which is limited to the Brown family of corpora—a set of eight corpora comprising published material in separate collections of British and American English drawn from writing at different time periods. Baker’s claim is that comparisons between them have “high validity” (6) because they were all built using the same sampling frame. The corpora offer a view into the state of the dialects in 1931, 1961, 1991, and 2006. [End Page 115] To give a flavor of the highly technical analysis that Baker undertakes, you will be a third of the way through the book before there is much discussion of words and what they mean in one dialect or the other. Up to that point, his discussion centers on a more atomic view of the dialects’ components: spelling differences, morphemes, affixes, letter sequences. The results are laid out in tables, charts, and graphs, with accompanying interpretive discussion. Baker’s sophisticated analysis of the corpus data is far beyond what a casual corpus user might discover. It is based on algorithmic queries of the corpora that make a simple wildcard search feel like child’s play. You will learn, for example, that in the Brown corpora, mean sentence length in British English began a slow increase in 1961 that did not begin to taper off until 1991, but even in 2006 it remained significantly longer than sentence length in American English. Americans, for their part, come out on top of the “standardised type token ratios” (22; a measure of lexical diversity), an achievement in which the data suggests that they surpassed the British in about 1980. For the most part, Baker is examining corpus language through a more abstract lens than the one that lexicographers use. He generates statistics about language based on changing frequencies of semantic categories, syntactic functions, and parts of speech, as indicated in the corpora by computer-driven tagging schemes. The findings in Baker’s book will be of interest mainly to corpus linguists, who are also the readers most likely to find fault with them. His analysis of the Brown corpora are novel and ingenious, and his interpretations of his results often show great imagination. But are they...

Introduction It has been repeatedly illustrated that the mandative subjunctive (e.g. He demanded that I be there on time ) has seen a re-emergence in different varieties of English (Turner 1980 for British English, Overgaard 1995 for British and American English, Peters 1998 for Australian English). Some studies have shown the subjunctive to be alive and well and living (primarily) in American English (Overgaard 1995, Albakry and Crawford 2004) or that American English is leading in its revitalization and that British English is ‘lagging behind’ (Hundt 1998b: 171). These studies have reached the general consensus that American English prefers the subjunctive form (e.g. They suggested that he be reprimanded ) while British English favours the modal construction ( They suggested that he should be reprimanded ). The present chapter is also concerned with describing subjunctive contrasts in British and American English through a close examination of a finite set of words (i.e. subjunctive triggers) which co-occur with the subjunctive. The focus of this chapter is not wholly concerned with whether American English has more subjunctives than British English or whether British English uses more modal forms than American English; instead, this chapter illustrates the distributional differences of complement clause types in both American and British English in a fairly large corpus of news writing.

This research was a descriptive research which was aimed at finding out the similarities, dissimilarities and the contributions of the contrastive analysis on teaching English as a foreign language. The data of this research were collected through library and internet sources. The researchers use comparative descriptive method to analyse the data. The obtained results was the comparison of American and British English in vocabulary, grammar, spelling, pronunciation and the contributions of them in teaching English as a foreign language. The research finding shows that British and American English are very similar in many aspects. Even though British and American English are mostly similar, they also have some differences. The difference of British and American English can be found in terms of vocabulary, grammar, spelling and pronunciation. Among them, vocabulary is the largest one. It is suggested that lecturers and teachers aware of the similarities and differences between British and American English in teaching English as a foreign language so that it will lead to the successful teaching of English including its varieties.

The objective of our article is to present the selected results of the research which was conducted for the purpose of our master’s thesis. We focused on the transfer of the functions of the present perfect into the domain of the preterite in informal British and American English. We put together a British and an American corpus and analysed the differences and similarities between British and American English in this transfer. We examined some factors that may influence this transfer either in American or British English, or in both varieties. The major factors will be presented in this article. The results show that the differences between both varieties mostly occur in the frequency of this transfer. Moreover, in American English there are more significant factors than in British English. Nevertheless, we can observe that the general tendency is the same in both varieties. This fact may indicate that this phenomenon, which was first noticed in informal American English, is spreading to informal British English.

There are many corpora of Inner Circle Englishes. Several corpora, especially the Brown family of corpora and the various national components of the International Corpus of English (ICE), cover their contemporary use in a balanced fashion. Larger register‐balanced corpora of contemporary usage cover British and American English well, but do not extend to the other Inner Circle varieties. Historical American English is covered very well from the early nineteenth century by the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), and American and British English are covered from the seventeenth century in A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers (ARCHER). Other Inner Circle varieties are covered from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in smaller historical corpora. Inner Circle varieties are particularly well represented in the very large online corpora such as the Global Web‐based English Corpus (GloWbE) and News on the Web Corpus (NOW). While there is some imbalance in the representation of American and British English versus the others, there are adequate resources to support extensive grammatical, lexical and stylistic research into Inner Circle varieties on a comparative basis.

ABSTRACT: The aim of this paper is to compare the distribution of prepositions in American and British English. Two machine‐readable 1 million word corpora, the BROWN Corpus of American English and the LOB Corpus of British English are used as a basis of comparison. The prepositions that occur in both American and British English account for more than 99% of all the occurrences of prepositions in both corpora. Moreover, the distribution of the six most commonly used prepositions (representing more than 70% of all the occurrences of prepositions in both corpora) is almost identical in American and British English. As far as prepositions are concerned, there is on the whole a very close distributional correspondence between British and American English.

This paper explores the comparative analysis of vowel systems within British, American, and Irish English accents, examining their phonetic characteristics, historical roots, and social implications. English has evolved into numerous varieties worldwide, primarily influenced by regional and social factors. The paper focuses on Received Pronunciation (RP) in British English, General American in American English, and Supraregional Irish English in Irish English, highlighting their distinct phonological features. Rhoticity and lexical sets are examined as key aspects of variation. Differences in the pronunciation of /r/ contribute to unique phonetic landscapes, with British English exhibiting non-rhoticity and American and Irish English maintaining rhoticity. The presence of centering diphthongs in British English and vowel contrasts before /r/ in Irish and American English further distinguishes these accents. Analysis of lexical sets reveals variations in vowel quality and realization, emphasizing the dynamic nature of phonological systems across accents. By examining these differences, the paper underscores the intricate interplay of historical, geographical, and social factors in shaping linguistic diversity. Understanding these nuances is essential for appreciating the complexity of English language variations and their cultural significance.

The study examined the semantic manifestations of English words in the Nigerian contexts and the implications for teaching in Nigerian secondary and primary education. The data for this study were obtained from Roger Blench’s (2005) Dictionary of Nigerian English (DNE) and Corpus of Global Web-Based English. While lexical items were culled from the dictionary, the contextual usages of the words which were drawn from the dictionary were gathered through the Corpus of Global Web-Based English. Using a lexical semantic approach, the study compared Standard English and Nigerian English by accounting for semantic shifts, semantic extensions, and morphologically marked neologisms in Nigerian English. Nigerians rarely utilize NE words that represent complete semantic shifts from BrE meanings. Unlike the 'total shift' situation, there is a disparity in the general usage of words to manifest NE extended meaning. The conclusion from the study is that, as it is evident that the English spoken in Nigeria is not the same as British English or American English, examination bodies’ insistence on BrE and AmE is futile and unreasonable. Nigerian English should be recognised by examination agencies; it should be developed and adopted as the Language of pedagogy for primary and secondary education in Nigeria.

It is well known that vowels are shorter before voiceless consonants than voiced ones in English, as in many other languages. Research has shown that the ratio of vowel durations in voiced and voiceless contexts in English is in the range of 0.6~0.8. However, little work has been done as to whether the ratio of vowel durations varies depending on English variety. In the production experiment in this paper, seven speakers from three varieties of English, New Zealand, British, and American English, read 30 pairs of (C)VC monosyllabic words which differ in coda voicing (e.g. beat-bead). Vowel height, phonemic vowel length, and consonant manner were varied as well. As expected, vowel-shortening effects were found in all varieties: vowels were shorter before voiceless than before voiced codas. Overall vowel duration was the longest in American English and the shortest in New Zealand (NZ) English. In particular, vowel duration before voiceless codas is the shortest in New Zealand English, indicating the most radical degree of shortening in this variety. As a result, the ratio of vowel durations in varying voicing contexts is the lowest in NZ English, while American and British English do not show a significant difference each other. In addition, consonant closure duration was examined. Whereas NZ speakers show the shortest vowel duration before a voiceless coda, their voiceless consonants have the longest closure duration, which suggest an inverse relationship between vowel duration and closure duration.

Comparative speech-act studies have found that British English directives tend to include the pragmatic marker please at about twice the rate of American English directives. Nevertheless, lexical please is often as frequent in American English corpora as in British ones – indicating that sincere directives are only part of this pragmatic marker’s story. This article reports on British and American please usage in the Corpus of Global Web-based English (GloWbE; Davies 2013). GloWbE shows similar numbers of non-verbal please on American and British websites, but also differences in what please is used for. This contributes to a larger picture of pragmatic variation in which British English uses a more bleached and routine please, whereas American please might be more at home effecting im/politeness in contexts of greater face-threat.

A number of recent studies of grammatical categories in English have identified regional and diachronic variation in the use of the present perfect, suggesting that it has been losing ground to the simple past tense from the eighteenth century onwards ( Elsness, 1997 , 2009 ; Hundt and Smith, 2009 ; and Yao and Collins, 2012 ). Only a limited amount of research has been conducted on non-present perfects. More recently, Bowie and Aarts’ (2012) study using the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English has found that certain non-present perfects underwent a considerable decline in spoken British English (BrE) during the second half of the twentieth century. However, comparison with American English (AmE) and across various genres has not been made. This study focusses on the changes in the distribution of four types of non-present perfects (past, modal, to-infinitival and ing-participial) in standard written BrE and AmE during the thirty-year period from the early 1960s to the early 1990s. Using a tagged and post-edited version of the Brown family of corpora, it shows that contemporary BrE has a stronger preference for non-present perfects than AmE. Comparison of four written genres of the same period reveals that, for BrE, only the change in the overall frequency of past perfects was statistically significant. AmE showed, comparatively, a more dramatic decrease, particularly in the frequencies of past and modal perfects. It is suggested that the decline of past perfects is attributable to a growing disfavour for past-time reference in various genres, which is related to long-term historical shifts associated with the underlying communicative functions of the genres. The decline of modal perfects, on the other hand, is more likely to be occurring under the influence of the general decline of modal auxiliaries in English.

This study examines the differences between British English and American English in the preference for should or the possibility of indicative forms in British English versus the overwhelming preference for be-subjunctives in American English is confirmed by the present- day data. The Mandative subjunctive is used to express suggestion, wishes, and demands and its usage has become subject to variation across various English dialects. The research uses data from the British National Corpus (BNC) on one hand, and from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) on the other, searching for contexts with similar triggers, like "requested that," "demanded that," and "urged that." The findings show that there is still an obvious preference for should in British English and for synthetic forms in American English, even though this paper also reveals there is a significant number of synthetic forms in the British English which contradict the traditional view that differentiates the two varieties. In contrast, the use of be-subjunctive is still strongly favored in American English. The results partially support statements regarding the distinctions between British and American English in terms of the mandative subjunctives.

The distinctive uses of right in British and American English interaction

The article examines certain differences between the American and the British variants and their impact on the system of the English language. The relevance of our research lies in the fact that there is a growing interest in the English language all over the world, which is directly related to the the process of globalization. The British and the American variants of English are very similar, but there are also many differences between them in terms of spelling, phonetics, grammar, and vocabulary. The main objective of the research is to investigate the following differences between the British and the American variants of English: spelling, phonetics, grammar, and vocabulary. Most of these differences are due to the unique historical and cultural development of these countries. The main purpose of knowing the differences between British and American English is to avoid difficulties in communication, when reading texts, watching movies or videos, and to ensure that speakers of both varieties of English fully understand each other. The article used research methods such as research and comparative analysis. In conclusion, it can be noted that although there are numerous differences between American and British English at the phonological, orthographic, grammatical, and lexical-semantic levels, these differences do not affect the system of the English language as a whole. Thus, this gives grounds to consider American and British English not two different languages, but two variants of the same language.

While recent research on English language teaching (ELT) in Germany has called for a more comprehensive representation of the diversity of English worldwide, learners’ perceptions of Global Englishes are currently underresearched despite their importance for a successful implementation of this change in ELT. The present paper analyzes 166 German secondary school students’ perceptions of Global Englishes, underlying cultural associations, and stereotypes. To this end, a perceptual dialect identification task, keyword association, and direct open questions were combined in a folklinguistic study. The results show that the informants consider British and American English as general standards and primarily associate English-speaking countries with Inner Circle varieties: British, American, and Australian English. British English is regarded as the default school reference norm, while American English is associated with dynamism and casualness. Furthermore, the students identify Indian and African English(es) as important Global Englishes. Their perceptions of these varieties are, however, less positive and seem to be influenced by cultural stereotypes, which might prompt them to perceive these varieties as funny or unintelligent. We suggest that learners’ existing knowledge of Global Englishes and explicit metalinguistic discussions of variation can be used as starting points to counteract such stereotypes.