Separated by a Common Language

It's been months! Contrary to what's perceptible, I am still a blogger! It's just that in the aftermath of the BOOK, I've had a lot of other writing and public-engaging to do. Much of it is collected here. The most recent piece I've published was in The Guardian, and relates to some of my current...

In the last post, I looked at of instead of have after modal verbs--as in should of gone and might of known--in contrast to the more standard spelling of the contraction 've: should've gone, might've known.  As we saw there, the of spelling was more prevalent in British online writing than...

I've been teaching a new course in Pragmatics this year, and this past week we ended it with a discussion of this article: Jefferson, Gail (2002) Is ‘‘no’’ an acknowledgment token? Comparing American and British uses of (+)/(-) tokens. Journal of Pragmatics 34: 1345-83. The author was an important...

John Wells sent me a really concise request (well, I'm reading the request into it):AmE I should have never done it = BrE I should never have done it- I don't think you've discussed this one, have you?No, I've not/I haven't discussed it, but John Algeo has in his book British or American English?Adverbs...

I started to write a long post this morning, but have been undone by my inability to produce a sentence tree that I can post on Blogger. I was hoping to make one in MS-Word, then find a way to export it as a .gif or other picture file. (Saving the Word file as html didn't preserve all the drawing...

Robert wrote last week to say: Watching a film called The Holiday yesterday evening, I was astonished to hear Jude Law, playing a British character, say, "Me, either" in reply to something Cameron Diaz had said. To my [...] Southern British ears that sounds very American. I would say "Neither/nor...