Grammatical Differences Between British and American English 1

The present article provides an overview of 63 grammatical differences between British English (BrE) and American English (AmE), ranging from well‐documented phenomena to contrasts that have only recently caught the eye of scholars. In addition to exemplifying each of these differences, the paper also highlights underlying generalizations. Such generalizations partly emerge from observable tendencies toward regularization and colloquialization, which generally affect AmE more strongly than BrE, but more recently also from findings suggesting that AmE is more sensitive to cognitive complexity effects than BrE. Thus, while AmE generally prefers less explicit variants in run‐of‐the‐mill contexts, it compensates more strongly than BrE for an increased processing load.

Affect (linguistics) · American English · British English · Cognition · North American English

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