Modern American English Grammar: A Preliminary Corpus-based Study

Abstract

Most of the existing literature has drawn our attention on the differences between British and American English by referring to contrasts in their pronunciation, spelling and vocabulary. However, the grammar of these two varieties has been very little considered from a contrastive and usage-based perspective. This study is thus intended to discuss some main features of the grammar of modern American English, namely the use of the present perfect versus the simple past, some of the auxiliary and semi-auxiliary verbs, the frequency of question tags, the question of agreement with collective nouns, the use of same prepositions, etc. To this end, I will firstly review the main works in the field and I will next refer to the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) to investigate the actual use of these features and eventually compare them with their British English counterparts with the aid of the British National Corpus (BNC) since they can be regarded as comparable corpora. The selection of the American English variety can be justified by the fact that the American culture has to a large extent been imposed through cinema and television in such a way can be considered as the most influential variety in the world today. The results obtained will hopefully allow me to arrive at some interesting conclusions and to see up to what extent the description of grammar of American English corresponds with its actual use