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British vs. American Word Forms

British vs. American Word Forms. Is there a significant difference between British and American word choice?. Choosing words. Type A: British vs. American words. Type B: Formal vs. Informal words. Pram vs. Stroller WC vs. Bathroom Crisps vs. Potato chips Keen on vs. Excited about

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British vs. American Word Forms

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  1. British vs. American Word Forms Is there a significant difference between British and American word choice?

  2. Choosing words

  3. Type A: British vs. American words Type B: Formal vs. Informal words • Pram vs. Stroller • WC vs. Bathroom • Crisps vs. Potato chips • Keen on vs. Excited about • Spelt vs. Spelled • Sneaked vs. Snuck • Shall vs. Will • Thought vs. Thunk • Squeezed vs. Squoze • Had drunk vs. Had drank Choosing Words

  4. Researching on corpora

  5. BNC http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/x.asp

  6. Close ups

  7. COCA http://www.americancorpus.org/

  8. Compiling data from corpora

  9. “The first question you are now faced with is how can you find out whether this distribution of modal auxiliaries is potentially important, i.e. whether, mathematically speaking, it is statistically significant. A distribution is said to be statistically significant if the likelihood that it has come about accidentally is below a certain level.” --ANATOL STEFANOWITSCH Are these numbers significant?

  10. Calculating Chi (X) http://www-user.uni-bremen.de/~anatol/qnt/qnt_dist.html • Add rows, columns and table for totals • Multiply row and column totals then divide by table total • Find the difference between observed and expected frequencies • Square it • Divide it by the observed frequency • Add up all four cell values for Chi value

  11. Type A: British vs. American words Type B: Formal vs. Informal words Chi Results

  12. Chi Significance Results: 1867.57 Significance:

  13. Linguistic significance

  14. Percentages British use burnt as a verb 42% of the time. Americans use burnt as a verb 8% of the time.

  15. Type A: British vs. American words Type B: Formal vs. Informal words More Percentages

  16. Conclusion: Yes, there is a significant difference between British and American word choice.

  17. Future Work • Compare other dialects of English • Include more words • Focus specifically on ending words with –t instead of –ed endings • Research difference between spoken and written language

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