different to and from

[Loren A. Billings]

On 12/13/07 2:21 PM, "Martin Votruba" <votruba+ at PITT.EDU> wrote:

> Sorry, Loren, I made a mistake.  The table's a bit disorganized in my
> mailer, I copied a wrong column, and got confused to boot.  I should
> have copied 0.6 from "US speech - to"  and compared it to 27.3 from
> "UK speech - to."
> 
> Meaning: even if 100% of the recorded US occurrences of _different
> to_ were of the type _They may be the same to you, but they're
> different to me_ (I'll call it "B" here), we would still be left with
> (27.3 minus 0.6 equals) 26.7% occurrences of _different to_ in
> British English where _to_ most likely indicates comparison unless we
> assume that statements "B" occur substantially more often in British
> English than in American English.

Let's assume for the sake of discussion that all of the American tokens were
of your B type. (And Alina has since written to me off-list confirming that
B-type hits could have made it into these totals.)

> In other words, the frequency of statements "B" cannot be higher than
> 0.6% in American English and therefore is unlikely to be
> substantially higher in British English unless we assume that the
> Brits say "B" multiple times more often than the Americans.  The
> frequency of "B" can probably be disregarded.

I just wonder at this point what proportion of the British 27.3 percent with
_different to_ are also of the B type.

> We don't disagree about the general issue.

Agreed. Loren out.

-- 

Loren A. Billings, Ph.D.
Associate professor of linguistics
Department of Foreign Languages and Literature
National Chi Nan University
Puli, Nantou County 545 Taiwan

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