Separated by a Common Language

I'm at the conference of the International Pragmatics Association in Manchester (UK) this week, and I was interested to see that there's a poster in the poster session (which is already posted, though the session's not till tomorrow) on directive speech acts in AmE and BrE. 'Directive speech act' means...

Dipping into the email bag, we have a months-old note from Andy: I was wondering whether you've done anything on your language blog regarding the uses of the phrases "have you got", "do you have" and "have you". I get the impression that "do you have" is the preferred form in America, whilst "have...

This post title has been hanging around in my drafts since August 2006, when the friend who's been known on this blog as Foundational Friend mentioned some AmE bugbears as potential fodder for the blog.  The offending AmE sentence was: Didn't you do that yet?  And she said that in BrE...

American-translator-in-Holland David wrote some time ago to say: I've noticed that Americans often place adverbial phrases that set the scene at the start of the sentence: At the time, I was not very interested in his work. British writers, in contrast, are more likely to put the adverbial element...

Have you read past the scary title of this post? Glad you're still with us! The phenomenon in question is how AmE and BrE speakers differ in their preferences for avoiding repetition of complex verb phrases in main clauses. (Still here?) So which of the following would you say? (1) I ate all...

Months ago (I am a bad blogger), Brett wrote to ask: Can you enlighten me any further on the differences between interpretations of "It's gone" in NA & the UK? (You can probably tell from the NA [=North America] that Brett is writing from Canada.) Brett covers this issue on his English, Jack...