Martin,
I'm really glad you brought this up - I've had the same thought. There are a large number of corpus-based studies on grammatical differences between British and American English, by people like e.g. Christian Mair, Marianne Hundt, Magnus Levin (agreement) and Maria Estling Vannestal (prepositions). In many cases it turns out that the so-called British and American variants occur in both varieties, but with large differences in relative frequency.
Suitable corpora, like LOB/Brown, FLOB/Frown, the ICE corpora or British and American newspapers on CD-ROM are certainly the best tools for such comparisons, together perhaps with elicitation tests (which are much more work).
Hans
Hans Lindquist
Docent/Associate professor
Engelska/English
Institutionen för humaniora/School of Humanities
Växjö universitet/Vaxjo University
SE-351 95 VÄXJÖ
Tel +46 470 708570
Fax + 46 470 751888
http://www.vxu.se/hum/eng/staff/english.html
http://www.vxu.se/hum/forskn/projekt/gramtime.html
----- Original Message -----
From: Martin Wynne <martin.wynne@oucs.ox.ac.uk>
Date: Thursday, November 9, 2006 10:56 am
Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] American and British English spelling converter
> I find it fascinating that as soon as we find a linguistic topic
> which
> sparks the interest of everyone here, the discussion suddenly makes
> hardly any reference to corpora. Why are suddenly anecdotes,
> intuitions,
> folk theories and made-up examples preferable to consulting corpora?
>
> It's a serious question. It seems to me reasonable to bring in
> these
> other factors and pieces of evidence to inform a discussion about
> corpus
> linguistics, but why is almost no-one consulting a corpus, or
> consulting
> research papers based on corpora? Lack of resources? Lack of tools?
> Don't think that use of corpora is appropriate for this question?
>
> Martin
>
> --
> Martin Wynne
> Head of the Oxford Text Archive and
> AHDS Literature, Languages and Linguistics
>
> Oxford University Computing Services
> 13 Banbury Road
> Oxford
> UK - OX2 6NN
> Tel: +44 1865 283299
> Fax: +44 1865 273275
> martin.wynne@oucs.ox.ac.uk
>
>
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Nov 09 2006 - 11:46:01 MET