This area is fraught with problems. The vocabulary of British and American
Englishes continue to borrow from each other. For instance, the phrase
"over the top" was markedly British in the early 1990s, and is now common
in American English. Spellings and even punctuation are also not entirely
reliable indicators. The magazine The New Yorker, a very American English
publication, continues to use the spelling "theatre." And I've even noticed
a number of my British colleagues are now using double quote marks/inverted
commas in their email correspondence.
Paul Heacock
Electronic Publishing Manager, ELT
Commissioning Editor, ELT Reference
Cambridge University Press
owner-corpora@lists.uib.no wrote on 11/03/2006 08:22:33 AM:
> >
> > Of which the second and third are now surely common to
> > British English, are they not?
> >
> >
> > On 3 Nov 2006, at 10:47, Harold Somers wrote:
> >
> > > To give just one example of each:
> > >
> > > Lift vs elevator
> > > Have you got vs do you have
> > > Half four vs 4:30
> >
>
> Diana beat me to it (while I was typing this reply!)
>
> There are 1033 occurrences of "do you have" in the BNC, not all of them
> interchangeable with "have you got". For example,
>
> How often do you have (* have you got) nightmares.
> Do you have them (* Have you got them) every night?
>
> 1860 occurrences of "have you got"
>
> (In case you're wondering, "gotten" occurs 110 times.)
>
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