<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; "><BR><DIV><DIV>On Nov 3, 2006, at 5:15 AM, Eric Atwell wrote:</DIV><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">I wonder if American corpora eg ANC have evidence of British spellings?</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV></BLOCKQUOTE></DIV><BR><DIV>We do indeed. A quick sampling of the 22 million words in the ANC so far gave us about 240 instances of "colour" and 160 of "behaviour". Some were in quotations and several were in a blog which is supposedly "guaranteed" to be produced by native speakers of American English. A few others were in the Berlitz Travel guides written especially for an American audience.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>More generally, as Paul Heacock pointed out, the differences between British and American English are becoming increasingly obscure, although we see continued differences in syntactic structures, adverbial usage, etc. as in <FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#121212">“She could not </FONT><I><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#121212">endure to live</FONT></I><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#121212"> with him” vs. “She could not </FONT><I><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#121212">endure living</FONT></I><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#121212"> with him”, <FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#050505">“Immediately I get home” vs. “As soon as I get home” and of course the famous "make a decision" vs. "take a decision".</FONT></FONT></DIV><DIV><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#050505"><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></FONT></DIV><DIV><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#050505">E</FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#050505">ven worse for us, a definition of American English is becoming very hard to provide--we could not get a definitive answer of a native speaker of American English from the American Dialect Society or LSA. Furthermore, with the influx of so many non-native English speakers who are learning and speaking English here in the US, we see the emergence of a brand of English spoken primarily (only?) in the US that is not exactly like what we might regard as "native American" English. The emergence of "Chicano English" is one obvious example, but this is slowly broadening to other language groups. </FONT></DIV><DIV><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#050505"><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></FONT></DIV><DIV><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#050505">We are planning for the future to include data that may not be produced by those we have so far considered to be native American English speakers in the ANC, but we *hope* to provide identification where possible of the linguistic background of the producer. </FONT></DIV><DIV><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#050505"><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></FONT></DIV><DIV><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#050505">Nancy Ide</FONT></DIV><BR><DIV> <SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Optima; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><DIV>=======================================================</DIV><DIV>Nancy Ide</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>Professor and Chair</DIV><DIV>Department of Computer Science</DIV><DIV>Vassar College</DIV><DIV>Poughkeepsie, New York 12604-0520 </DIV><DIV>USA</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>tel: (+1 845) 437 5988</DIV><DIV>fax: (+1 845) 437 7498</DIV><DIV>email: <A href="mailto:ide@cs.vassar.edu">ide@cs.vassar.edu</A></DIV><DIV><A href="http://www.cs.vassar.edu/~ide">http://www.cs.vassar.edu/~ide</A></DIV><DIV>=======================================================</DIV><BR class="Apple-interchange-newline"></SPAN> </DIV><BR></BODY></HTML>