[Corpora-List] American and British English-authorship

[Dr Li Lan]

With the vast change from printing literature to electronic literature,  I think it is unlikly for anyone to get a pour BE or AE corpus from the Internet, where editorial gatekeeping is rather limited. The globalisation enables people to travel and work in any part of the world. E-data are in most cases anonomous. We can hardly know who the authors are. The data collected in America may be produced by Britons working in the States. The non-native English users may have been educated in the States, UK, Canada, ect and they may have got the citizenship of these countries. So, how can we know the authorship of the texts collected?

HK is supposed to follow British English convention, as stipulated in governmental or institutional documents,  but in  my trilingual business corpus, BE and AE spellings co-exist; BE spelling prevails, of course.

Regards

**********************************************
Dr Li Lan
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Hung Hom  KLN    
Hong Kong
Tel: 852 27667978   Fax: 852 23336569

 

----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Nancy Ide 
  To: CORPORA at UIB.NO 
  Cc: Nancy Ide 
  Sent: Saturday, November 04, 2006 3:14 AM
  Subject: [Corpora-List] American and British English 




  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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