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@cs.vassar.edu
http://www.cs.vassar.edu/~ide
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