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Last week at Corpus Linguistics 2017 , Rachele De Felice and I presented our research on thanking in US and UK corporate emails. We'll be writing that up for publication in the coming months. In the meantime, here's a tiny aspect of what we found, supplemented by some further thoughts. Our main question was about the relationship between please and thank* (that * is a wildcard, so thank* stands for thanks and thank you ). Brits use please much more than Americans; Americans use thank* much more than Brits—both in our email research and in others' research on spoken language. So a big part of what we're looking at is whether thanks in American does some of the work that please does in Britain. (Short answer: it seems so. For my past posts on please , please see/comment-at this post and this one .) That's what our published paper will be about. But while we were in that data, we also looked at other aspects of thanking, including how it's intensified—e.g. th...

from t he Guardian Today the Guardian reported on a new study by Bruno Gonçalves, Lucía Loureiro-Porto, José J. Ramasco, and David Sánchez ( you can get the pdf here ) entitled The End of Empire: the Americanization of English . There are interesting things to find in this study, but I'm taken back to a panel that Sandra Jansen , Mario Saraceni and I presented on 'problems in predicting the linguistic future' last week in Newcastle. The focus of our talks was how the media present change in the English language and how linguists  sometimes contribute to skewed presentations of past, present and future—taking part in the very linguistic ideologies that academic linguists should be regarding with a critical eye. We're now working on making our panel contributions into an article, and I think it'll be a good one. It's perfectly clear that many originally-American words and spelling standards have spread elsewhere. It would be surprising if they hadn't, sin...

Today's post, I'm happy to say, is a guest post by Maddy Argy, an A-level student who's doing (BrE) work experience with me at the University of Sussex. I've asked her to find American-British differences that she could research and have introduced her to some of the tools we linguists use. I'm happy to introduce her first post!  To Each His Own 1946 When reading a blog post written by an American English speaker, I noticed she used the phrase to each their own which didn't sound natural to me. Previously, having lived in Britain all my life, I have primarily used and heard only each to their own . The phrase is used in both American and British English, however most likely originated from Latin. In the Corpus of Global Web-Based English ,  to each their own is heavily used in American English, with a total of 418 in all its forms. In British English however there is a total of only 105. Meanwhile here it's clear that each to their own is more commonly...

Those who follow the blog may remember that in February I was on BBC Radio 4's Word of Mouth , where fellow guest Matthew Engel and I debated the effect of American English on British English. Engel had written many newspaper columns on the topic, but at that point his book, That’s the way it crumbles: the American conquest of English , was yet to appear. What struck me in that radio conversation was how little Engel appeared to have to say about a topic he’d just written a book about. While he had some examples, he mostly seemed to repeat his claim that American English is "taking over" British English while offering little more than the experience-based perceptions of an Englishman in his seventh decade. He does have much more to say in the book, but he hasn't changed my mind about the topic. (You're not surprised, right?) I'm writing this on my way back from giving a conference paper on the research gaps and logical problems in British arguments that ...