One Language, Two Grammars?: Differences between British and American English (Studies in English Language)

Hardcover, 3rd printing, xxiv + 461 pages, NOT ex-library. Shipping weight over 1kg. Faint blue marks along the side edges of two pages; a tiny corner crease on a couple of leaves. Else interior is clean and bright throughout with unmarked text, free of inscriptions and stamps, firmly bound. Moderate handling marks on outer page edges and boards. No dust jacket. -- This collection investigates the grammatical divergences between British and American English. While differences in vocabulary and pronunciation are widely recognised, the text challenges the assumption that the two national varieties share an identical grammatical system. Using large-scale electronic databases, such as the British National Corpus, the contributors provide empirical evidence on specific syntactic variations. Chapters focus on distinct structural differences, including determiners, tense and aspect usage, modal verbs like 'shall' versus 'will', adverb placement, and relative clauses. The research highlights diverging trends, accurately mapping how American English frequently leads in progressive forms while simultaneously preserving older features like the bare mandative subjunctive. Tracing these morphological and syntactic shifts back to the seventeenth century, the text examines historical mechanisms such as the colonial lag hypothesis. The empirical data demonstrates that neither variety is strictly more conservative or innovative than the other, as both are driven by contact influences, frequency effects, and stylistic factors. The book provides quantified historical and contemporary data for researchers studying transatlantic language variation within corpus linguistics, historical linguistics, and dialectology.