[Corpora-List] American and British English

[Nancy Ide]

On Nov 3, 2006, at 5:15 AM, Eric Atwell wrote:
>
> I wonder if American corpora eg ANC have evidence of British  
> spellings?
>

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.

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 “She could not endure to live with him”  
vs. “She could not endure living with him”, “Immediately I get home”  
vs. “As soon as I get home” and of course the famous "make a  
decision" vs. "take a decision".

Even 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.

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.

Nancy Ide

=======================================================
Nancy Ide

Professor and Chair
Department of Computer Science
Vassar College
Poughkeepsie, New York 12604-0520
USA

tel: (+1 845) 437 5988
fax: (+1 845) 437 7498
email: ide at cs.vassar.edu
http://www.cs.vassar.edu/~ide
=======================================================


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