Great Vs. Lovely: Stance Differences in American and British English

Stance Differences in American and British English 1

Great vs. Lovely: Stance Differences in American and British English

Kristen Precht

Kent State University

Abstract

This study compares stance marker frequencies, part of speech frequencies, and the most common stance markers in British and American conversation. The corpus is comprised of 100,000 words of conversation taken from conversations at home in America and Great Britain, excerpted from the Longman Corpus of Spoken and Written English. Stance marker frequencies were assessed through the computer program, StanceSearch, which automates the identification of stanced lexical items occurring in particular grammatical frames. Four categories of stance markers were examined: affect (marking emotion and attitude), evidentials (marking certainty, doubt, and commitment), quantifiers (marking hedges and emphatics), and modal verbs. Similar proportions are found in American and British conversation in stance category and part of speech use. There is a strong relationship between part of speech and stance category: Affect is expressed with adjectives and verbs, quantifiers are adverbial, and epistemic stance is verbal. Main differences are in lexical choice. The British had lower frequencies than Americans for emotion-expressing affect markers, first-person verbs which express emotive affect, and emphatics. The Americans had lower frequencies for modals verbs. The results suggest that cultural differences are not based on differences in the proportions of stance markers in categories, but rather are based on subtle lexical differences. To pinpoint these differences, these lexical differences must be examined more closely.

1. Introduction

A: Yeah I know. I hate brushing with Crest. B: I hate brush, I brushed with Mentadent and I keep telling my mom I’m like it just doesn’t do anything to me, it feels nice like it’s going to be like tingly but it’s like I have to have a toothpaste that leaves me minty if I have like a yukky taste in my mouth. (Longman Corpus of Spoken and Written English)

Efficiency, one of the features of e-mail messages frequently mentioned by e-mail users, seems to equate with informal and flexibility of style, a fact that is supported by the absence of manuals that establish the norms for the composition of messages. (Gimenez, 2000, p. 250)

The above examples are expressions of stance, with the stance markers italicized. The first is from a conversation between two teenagers, and the second from a research article conclusion. Stance includes the expression of affect (emotion and attitude), evidentiality (the degree of certainty and commitment), quantifiers (emphatics and hedges) and modal verbs. Stance permeates nearly every part of language, from conversation to technical manuals, and from poetry to research articles. Stance expression has been shown to be systematically different across cultures (Precht, 2000; Precht, forthcoming). These differences suggest that we have an ingrained system—a shorthand, you might say—for expressing our emotions and attitudes. The resources of language enable a virtually unlimited number of ways that we could express ourselves, yet it would seem that we are culturally “programmed”, to use a very limited, very specific subset of these options. If we are actually programmed to express stance in particular ways, then when we are in situations where others express stance differently, our interpretation of others' motivations and attitudes can be flawed. It is my contention that we identify and stereotype others on the basis of their stance use. One such cultural crossroads is between American and British speakers of English. Common stereotypes suggest that the British are more reserved and polite, and Americans are more direct and brash. In examining the characteristics of stance, this study will compare American and British conversation to determine whether these differences can be quantified at the level of stance category, part of speech or lexical choice. There have been many articles on stance in the past few years, often focusing on only one aspect of stance, such as hedging. For example, Hyland (2000) finds that hedges in academic prose Stance Differences in American and British English 2 are used to signal the relationship between the reader and writer. Such studies highlight the ways that stance can be difficult to interpret. Its uses and purposes spin into a complex web of politeness, presentations of self, and interaction patterns. Very little work has been done, though, on the large-scale characteristics of stance such as the relationships between the types of stance and their grammatical properties. Such a large-scale description could provide a baseline against which qualitative analyses, such as Hyland' s, are compared: If we understand the global characteristics, then variations from these characteristics can more accurately made. This study is a first step toward understanding these global characteristics. The research questions investigated in this study are as follows: 1. What are the proportions of stance in the stance categories of affect, evidentiality, hedging and modal verbs in American and British conversation? 2. What is the breakdown by part of speech of stance expressions? 3. Is there a relationship between stance category and part of speech? and 4. What are the most common stance markers in these stance categories for American and British conversation? This study is largely quantitative, using the StanceSearch computer program to identify and count stance markers across a corpus of 100,000 words. This methodology is a promising development in corpus linguistics, and shows a new way to examine pragmatic concepts such as stance. Although qualitative analyses are necessary to interpret pragmatic concepts, the integration of quantitative techniques may be able to highlight patterns that can only be identified through large-scale corpus analyses.

2. Literature Review

This review of the literature focuses on the work on part of speech, semantic category and dialect in stance research. To begin this discussion, we need to define stance and outline the categories that this study will investigate. As mentioned above, past studies of stance-related phenomena have often focused on a single aspect of stance, as in Hyland' s work on hedging (1994, 1999, 2000). Expressions of affect, evidentiality and hedging are so closely inter-related in use, though, and lexical items from one category often have pragmatic functions related to a different category (Precht, 2000). It is important, then, to investigate these categories in an integrated way in order to begin to identify their connections. The stance categories used in this study are based largely on the stance categorization in Biber, et al. (1999). Figure 1 shows the way that the stance categories are operationalized in this study.

Affect ADJECTIVES: good, right, nice, funny, great, sorry, bad, bloody, lovely NOUNS: problem, gee, god, sympathy ADVERBIALS: unfortunately, sadly VERBS: want, need, like, love

Evidentiality MENTAL VERBS: know, think, thought, look like, mean RELATIONSHIP VERBS: seem, appear REPORTING VERBS: read, heard ADJECTIVES: sure, real, true ADVERBIALS: maybe, probably, obviously, of course, absolutely, actually NOUNS: fact, reason

Quantifiers ADJECTIVES: all, more, most, whole, much ADVERBIALS: just, about, really, so, kind of, like, too, never Figure 1. Categories of Stance

Stance Differences in American and British English 3

In addition to these categories, I am also including modal verbs. The methodology which I use does not categorize modals in terms of stance mood. Modal verbs can express quite different moods, and it is not yet possible to identify these moods with a computer program. 2.1 Previous studies

Stance categories. Studies of stance categories have largely focused on comparing stance marker use across proficiency, register or culture. Such studies have found important differences in use, but most of it is focused on written rather than spoken discourse. Results suggest that differences are evident between native and non-native English speakers’ writing (Hyland & Milton, 1997; Dong, 1996; Gosden, 1995; Mauranen, 1993), between writers at different proficiency levels (Intaraprawat & Steffensen, 1995; Longo, 1995; Cheng & Steffensen, 1996), and between registers (Biber & Finnegan, 1988, 1989; Chafe, 1986; Hyland, 1999, 2000). In studies of spoken discourse, studies have shown differences between spoken and written stance (Chafe, 1986; Holmes, 1988, Biber & Finnegan, 1988, 1989), problems in non-native speaker epistemic expressions (Kärkäinen, 1988, 1989), and differences based on roles and power (Prince, et al., 1982). These studies have often looked qualitatively at small corpora. While this gives us a good insight into the nature of the differences, it is hard to interpret such results in terms of overall stance patterns in language. The differences examined may be very similar to overall language use, or they may be based on a subsection with very unusual properties: it is not possible to judge. My study is attempting to sort out large-scale patterns in stance categories so that such studies can be interpreted more broadly. Part of speech. There are many studies which investigate the relationship between stance and part of speech. To date, it is not clear whether stance is more likely to be expressed using lexical verbs, adverbials, adjectives, nouns or modal verbs. Studies have shown differences, yet the differences are difficult to interpret broadly. Most studies, in fact, focus only on a few parts of speech. Table 1 shows the parts of speech examined in some of the seminal work on stance:

Table 1. Studies examining the role of part of speech in stance LEXICAL ADVERBIAL ADJECTIVAL NOUN MODAL VERB VERB Biber & Finegan (1988) 3 Biber & Finegan (1989) 3 3 3 3 3 Biber, et al. (1999) 3 3 3 3 3 Chafe (1986) 3 3 3 Holmes (1983) 3 3 3 3 3 Hoye (1997) 3 3 Huebler (1983) 3 3 3 Hyland & Milton (1997) 3 3 3 3 3 Hyland (1994) 3 3 3 3 3 Kärkäinen (1989) 3 3 3 Palmer (1979) 3 Perkins (1983) 3 3 3 3 3 Salager-Meyer (1995) 3 3 3 3 3 Schramm (1996) 3 Williams (1996) 3

From this chart, it is evident that there is not a concensus on which parts of speech are most important to consider in analysing stance. The study I am presenting here attempts to clarify the relationship between part of speech analysis and stance in conversation. Stance Differences in American and British English 4

Dialect. Although stance comparisons have been made between native and non-native speakers of English, there has been little work comparing stance American and British English. Precht (forthcoming) suggests that the main moods of stance are different in the two dialects. American English is characterized as being higher in expression of personal preference and emotion, while British English has more expressions of possibility and hedged reflection. It is not clear from this study, however, whether this is due to differences in the proportion of affective and evidential stance markers, or whether it is due to preferences for difference stance markers: Do the American use more affect markers, different affect markers, or higher frequencies of affect markers than the British? The current study will attempt to shed light on these questions.

3. Methodology

The analyses in this study are based on frequency counts of stance markers across a large corpus. This section first identifies the corpus used in this study. Then the procedures used in the StanceSearch program to assess and count stance markers are described. Finally, the analysis techniques used with the data are explained. 3.1 Corpus

The corpus for this study is excerpted from the Longman Corpus of Spoken and Written English (LCSWE). The conversation in the corpus for this study occur at home, half with children present and half without children present. Similar numbers of transcripts were used for each dialect, as shown in Table 2.

Table 2. Description of Corpus Number Number of Files of Words British Conversation 96 444,220 American Conversation 94 514,062 190 958,282

Spoken language is often estimated at 7,000 words per hour, and at this rate, the corpus contains approximately 135 hours of spoken language. 3.2 Identifying stance markers

Potential stance items are identified from several sources. First, items were culled from the lists of stance items in past research. Most studies do not include comprehensive lists of the stance markers analysed, so this method is not adequate in compiling a comprehensive list. A notable exception to this is Biber, et al. (1999), which served as the backbone for the identification of potential stance items. Another source of potential items are the corpus texts themselves. Several segments from different registers were reviewed, and common stance markers were added to the list. Words found in the corpus include WORSE, CONCRETE, SCATHING, and SCUZZY. Finally, a thesaurus was consulted for further examples of stance (The concise Roget's international thesaurus, 1994). Stance markers were collected from the major semantic categories of evidentiality and affect in the thesaurus. Words identified in the thesaurus include LEERY, DEEM, and TEDIOUS. A list of 1,301 lexical items were identified through this procedure, reported in Precht, 2000. The process of identifying and counting stance markers is performed by a computer program called StanceSearch, described in detail in Precht, 2000. The 1,301 lexical items are sought in the corpus. When an item is found, the grammatical context of the item is examined to determine, for example, whether an adjective is predicative or attributive, whether a verb is preceded by a first, second or third person subject, or whether a verbs is followed by a clause. Grammatical frames can be used to distinguish between stanced and non-stanced meanings of words. For example, the word CLEAR has a stanced meaning as a predicative adjective (as in “clear as mud”), and a non-stanced meaning as an attributive adjective (as in “clear glass”). This program has shown to be accurate in its stance assessment more than 94% of the time. Stance Differences in American and British English 5

3.3 Frequency count analysis

The StanceSearch program creates normed frequency counts for individual stance markers, for each stance category, and for each part of speech. These counts are used to make large-scale comparisons between the American and British conversations in terms of the types of stance markers (affect, evidentiality, quantifying, and modal) and the parts of speech they use. While it may be expected that such comparisons would involve significance testing, there are reasons for choosing other methods of analysis. The relationship between statistical significance and stance has not been established: differences which are statistically significant may not actually be noticeable in speech, or, on the other hand, differences which are not statistically significant may, in fact, be detectable in speech. Dialect comparisons for stance categories and parts of speech are made in terms of the average frequencies per 1,000 words, across the corpus. In order to identify lexical differences, comparisons are also made between the frequencies of the most common stance markers. This data is examined in terms of average frequency per hour of conversation, which seems the easiest to interpret differences meaningfully.

4. Results and discussion

The results are presented in four sections. Section 4.1 presents the stance category frequencies, and identifies differences between American and British conversation in terms of overall category use. Section 4.2 presents the part of speech frequency across dialects. Section 4.3 examines the relationship between part of speech and stance category. Section 4.4 lists the most common stance markers by dialect, and identifies dialect differences in stance marker use. 4.1 Stance category characteristics

The amount of stance marking is higher than might be anticipated: nearly 10% of the words in conversations are identified as stanced in both American and British conversation (Table 3). There is virtually no difference between the dialects in terms of the total amount of stance. In terms of individual categories, the British had slightly fewer affect, evidential and quantifying stance markers, and slightly more modals overall (Fig. 2).

Table 3. Frequency of stance categories across dialects per 1,000 words of conversation American British Affect 25.96 24.09 Evidential 25.54 23.96 Quantifying 26.13 23.88 Modal 19.82 23.09 Total 97.45 95.02

d 30 r o 25 w

0 20

0 , American 1 / 15 y British c

n 10 e

q 5 e

F 0

Affect Epistemic Quantifying Modal Stance Category

Fig. 2. Comparison of stance category frequencies in American and British conversations Stance Differences in American and British English 6

The relative balance between the categories of stance is a new finding. Past studies did not tend to compare frequencies across stance categories. The lack of attention to affect marking (Precht, 2000) would suggest that affect marking might be lower than other categories, but this turns out not to be the case. 4.2 Part of speech characteristics

Table 4 reports the frequencies of stance markers in terms of their parts of speech. The American and British conversations are again similar; the main difference is that the Americans tend to use more lexical verbs than modal verbs, while the British use lexical and modal verbs equally (see Figure 3).

Table 4. Frequency of stance adjectives, nouns, adverbials, and verbs across dialects per 1,000 words of conversation* American British Adjectives 22.61 21.72 Nouns 3.57 2.97 Adverbials 22.45 22.03 Lexical Verbs 28.67 24.07 Modal Verbs 19.82 23.09 Total 97.12 93.87 *The totals here are not idential to those in Table 3 due to difficulties in assigning a small number of items to a stance category or part of speech.

s d

r 30

o w 25 0 0

0 , 20 American 1

/ y 15 British c

n e

u 10 q e r 5 F 0

Adjectives Nouns Adverbs Lexical Modal Verbs Verbs Part of Speech

Fig. 3. Part of speech frequency for stance markers in American and British conversation

Adjectives, adverbials, lexical verbs and modal verbs are used in relatively equal proportions. Nouns, however, are comparatively rare. Based on studies showing differences in part of speech distribution, this finding is unexpected. Past studies suggested that adverbials are less frequent than modals (Biber, et al., 1999) and that adverbials are more common than adjectives (Hyland, 1996). These differences might be accounted for by differences in corpora.

4.3 Relationship between stance category and part of speech

Several studies have suggested that stance categories have tendencies to use one part of speech over another. Biber & Finegan (1989) seems to suggest a relationship between affect and adjectives. Hyland (1999) suggests that epistemic mental verbs are an important element in evidentiality, especially in informal register. These findings seem to be born out in the current Stance Differences in American and British English 7 study. Table 5 shows the parts of speech for each stance category, with the highest frequency part of speech highlighted.

Table 5. Dialect Comparison for Stance Category and Part of Speech

Stance Part of Speech Dialect Frequency per Category 1,000 Words American British Affect adjective 12.85 12.89 noun 3.09 2.44 adverbials 0.67 0.70 verbs 9.03 6.92 Evidential adjective 2.10 1.31 noun .48 .91 adverbials 3.32 4.97 verbs 19.64 17.14 Quantifying adjectives 7.66 7.52 nouns 0 0 adverbials 18.47 16.36 verbs 0 0 Modal verbs 19.82 23.09

According to this data, stance categories seem to be related to specific parts of speech. For affect, adjectives are most common (although verbs are a close second). For evidentiality, verbs are by far the most common, and for quantifying stance, adverbials are most common. These patterns hold true across dialects, with slight differences in frequency: The British have more modal verbs and slightly fewer evidential verbs and quantifying adverbials. The similarities between American and British patterns are striking. The part of speech frequencies within the four stance categories are very similar across dialects. 4.4 Individual stance markers and dialect

Frequencies for individual stance markers were compared for affect adjectives and verbs, evidential verbs, quantifying adverbials and modal verbs. The stance markers which occurred on average more than once per hour across the entire corpus are listed in the tables below. An hour of conversation was computed at 7,000 words based on Biber, et al., 1999. 4.4.1 Affect markers and dialect

Table 6 lists the most frequent affect adjectives, from the most to the least frequent, by dialect. Stance Differences in American and British English 8

Table 6. Frequency per Hour for Affect Adjectives Frequency Dialect (times used American British per hour) 20 right good 15 right good

10 nice L o

great nice w e

5 r

bad bad r e q

funny lovely u e

sorry wrong n c y

wrong sorry bad fucking great funny 1 mad awful crazy best stupid happy wrong horrible fucking worse worse stupid best glad interesting happy

There is a great deal of overlap between the American and British: many of the stance markers are used with similar frequencies in the two dialects. ‘American’ adjectives (those not used by British at least once per hour) include: REAL, INTERESTING, MAD, CRAZY, and GLAD. ‘British’ adjectives are: LOVELY, AWFUL and HORRIBLE. Precht (2000) identifies two main types of affect: opinion (used to express what one thinks, as in WRONG or INTERESTING), and emotion (used to express what one feels, as in HAPPY or SORRY). Both dialects use opinion and emotion adjectives, but the Americans had more emotion adjectives (MAD, CRAZY, and GLAD) than the British. The affect verbs are shown in Table 7. As explained in Section 3.2, verb counts are broken down by person marking (first, second or third person), negation, and clausal frame (having a to- clause, that-clause, wh-clause, if-clause, or direct object following the verb). For ease of display, the verbs are shown in a clause structure such as the one which the StanceSearch program identified. X is used to indicate that the verb was followed by a direct object. Interrogative structure is used to display some verbs, but the stance markers could occur in either declarative or interrogative structures. Stance Differences in American and British English 9

Table 7. Frequency per Hour of Affect Verbs* Frequency Dialect (times used American British per hour) 6 do you want to do you want X 5 do you want X 4 I want to do you want to does she want to he wanted to 3 I like

I don' t want to I want X L o

I love w e r

I need X

2 they wanted to I want to r e q

I need to do they want to u e n

I' d like I like c y do you need I don' t want to I want X does he mind do they need any I don' t want X I hate I need X I hope I hope 1 I don' t want X do you need I wanted to I' d like they didn' t want to do they need X they love I don' t mind I wish I love they wanted X he didn©t want to I need to I wish I hate *Italics indicate the type of clause following the verb. X indicates a that noun phrase follows.

Second person boulomaic verbs (such as WANT, NEED and WOULD LIKE) are the most common affect verbs, more common than emotion verbs in both American and British conversations. One difference between the American and British conversations is in person marking. Americans use first person more frequently than British: Americans have five first person verbs which are used three or more times per hour, while the British have one. Another difference is between boulomaic and emotion-expressing verbs. Verbs which express emotion, such as LOVE, MIND and LIKE, seem to have much higher frequencies in American conversations than in British conversations. From this, it would appear that Americans directly express emotion more frequently than British. The tendency for Americans to use more emotive adjectives, emotive verbs and first person markers may begin to account for cultural stereotypes of the British as more reserved and Americans as more direct. The effect of these differences is hard to judge, but these tendency would suggest that the differences between American and British conversational stance is based on lexical, rather than stance category, differences. 4.4.2 Evidential verbs

Table 8 lists the frequencies for evidential verbs. The verbs are shown in their grammatical frames, including person marking, negation and clausal constructions.

Stance Differences in American and British English 10

Table 8. Evidential verbs by dialect*

Frequency Dialect (times used American British per hour) > 6 I mean (14 x per hour) I mean (17 x per hour) I think that (14 x per hour) I think that (13 x per hour) I don' t know (8 x per hour) 6 I know (X) I know (X) do you know wh- 5 I thought that I thought that I know that I don' t know do they know (X) I think (so)

4 I think (so) I know that L o

3 I guess that c y I guess (so) I suppose do you think that do you know wh- 2 I thought I don©t know that I don©t know if do you think that I wonder I wonder do you mean I know wh- it looks like that seems I was thinking do they think that I don©t believe (so/X) 1 do you think (so) do you mean do they think that I was thinking I thought do you think (so) do they know that that means that seems I think if I knew that don' t they know (X) I know wh- *Italics indicate the type of clause following the verb. Parentheses indicate that the element is optional. X indicates a that noun phrase follows.

For both American and British conversations, first person is much more frequent than second or third person subject. For Americans, nineteen out of the 28 stance markers were in first person, and for British sixteen of the 26 were in first person. Mental verbs are far and away the most common types of verbs: most of the items are forms of either KNOW or THINK. These two verbs mark a statement as provisional in an interesting way: by focusing on the mental state of the speaker (rather than the truth-value of the proposition), a conversation is more of a speaker©s alignment of an opinion rather than an evaluation of the validity of propositions (Precht, 2000). MEAN, LOOK LIKE, and SEEM are the only non-mental verbs. These verbs are often used to investigate inferences or options, or to request clarification, as in “do you mean we have to go now?” or “it looks like we’ll have to drive”. As such, these verbs seem much more focused on the truth-value of the proposition than the mental verbs. These verbs are used in similar frequencies in the two dialects. Past tense and negation are used to distance the speaker from the statement, and these are common in both American and British conversation. Approximately half (nine of the American and seven of the British) first-person epistemic mental verbs are in either past tense or negated. Stance Differences in American and British English 11

The main differences between the American and British conversations are in lexical choice. GUESS and LOOK LIKE are used frequently by Americans (but not British), and SUPPOSE is used frequently by British (but not Americans).

4.4.3 Quantifiers

Table 9 describes the frequencies of quantifiers across dialects. Table 9. Quantifying adverbials by dialect Frequency Dialect (times used American British per hour) > 20 all (28 x per hour) all (33 x per hour) really (22 times per hour) 20 like (+ quantity) 15 too really like (+ quantity) L

10 about about o w

a bit e r

more F r e q

9 more only u e

8 much much n c y

kind of 7 so sort of never never quite 6 even too 5 always lot of real 4 only always pretty lot of even 3 a bit so 2 most most exactly nearly sort of quite 1 such a kind of such a

Most hedges, such as ABOUT, LOT OF, SORT OF and KIND OF, are in relatively equal frequency in the two dialects. The Americans seem to have more emphatics, though, than the British. TOO, SO, REAL and EXACTLY are used with markedly higher frequency by Americans than British, while only one emphatic (ONLY) is used more frequently by British. This suggests that American conversation may have more exaggeration or increased commitment than British. This difference may point to another area that contributes to the British and American stereotypes. There are four items which seem dialect specific. REAL, PRETTY and EXACTLY are only used frequently by Americans, and NEARLY is only used frequently by British. 4.4.4 Modal verbs

The frequencies for modal verbs, by dialect and part of speech, are presented in Table 10. Stance Differences in American and British English 12

Table 10. Frequency for modal verbs across dialects in first, second and third person Frequency First Person Second Person Third Person (times per American British American British American British hour) > 10 ' ll ' ll would would 10 ' ll, can can 8 would would can can can can will will 6 have to can' t can' t have to 4 could have to have to ' ll can' t L o

should could ' ll can' t won' t w e

can' t might r

must r e q

wouldn' t u e n

could c y 2 will wouldn' t can' t could could have to couldn' t should could should couldn' t will ' ll might should couldn' t must shall won' t have to might wouldn' t 1 wouldn' t must should would couldn' t could be might shall would might could be won' t might won' t should will

Stance Differences in American and British English 13

In the stance category analyses in Section 4.2, modal verbs were shown to be more frequent in British conversation than American. In looking at the frequencies for modals, it seems that this is due to the frequencies for items occurring less than five times per hour. Among the most frequent items, the American and British patterns seem quite similar. From the frequency level of four occurrences per hour and below, the British frequencies are an average of one frequency per hour higher than the American frequencies for the same stance marker. For example, the third person MIGHT occurs 3.6 times per hour in British conversation, and 2.3 times per hour in American conversation. The first person modal WOULDN' T occurs 2.1 times per hour in British conversation, and 1.2 times per hour in American. It is difficult to make semantic comparisons from this information since modal verbs can convey a variety of meanings. The one pattern which does seem robust is that American conversation has higher frequencies for modals of obligation (SHOULD, HAVE TO, COULDN' T) than British conversation.

5. Conclusions

Several patterns are evident from the above results. First, British and American conversational stance is very similar across semantic categories. Approximately 10% across the entire corpus have stance. The two dialects have nearly equal amounts of affect, evidential, quantifying and modal stance. Second, the data show that stance is expressed in adjectives, adverbials, lexical verbs and modal verbs in relatively equal proportions. Nouns are considerably less frequent than other parts of speech in expressing stance. Third, the results suggest that stance categories are likely to be aligned with a particular part of speech. Affect seems to be more adjectival than nominal or adverbial. Evidentiality has a higher frequency of verbal stance markers than adjectival, nominal or adverbial markers. Quantifiers are largely adverbial. This pattern is consistent across dialects. And fourth, the frequencies of individual stance markers suggest that differences in dialect are related to both lexical choice and semantic mood. Lexical differences across dialects were noted in affect adjectives, affect verbs, quantifiers and modals. The British had lower frequencies than Americans for emotion-expressing affect markers, first-person verbs which express emotive affect, and emphatics. The Americans had lower frequencies for modals verbs. It is at this level that differences occur which result in cultural stereotypes. A comparison of the use of two verbs, LOVE and HATE, highlights the ways in which the stance markers are used in different ways in the two dialects. For both of these items, there are specific contexts in which the items are used which differ culturally. The verb LOVE is used in three contexts in both American and British conversation: for humans, for enjoyment, and for a specific inanimate object. British do not, however, seem to use love for generic inanimate objects with any regularity. Table 11 compares the differences in these uses:

Table 11: American and British usage of LOVE Context American Usage British Usage LOVE: human I would get this love letter or a card or I love you. Oh Katie, there' s a roses, usually it was with roses with a crocodile coming. Quick quick quick, note that said I still love you. quick climb up on the boat. [1mc8.lei] [bad115101] I love your big ears. [1mc9.mop] LOVE: I would love to get out of town this I would love to see them manage on enjoyment weekend. [aad15401] it. [1wc5.ssh] LOVE: specific, I love these jelly ones. [aad151001] I love the way that both passports are inanimate object sealed together [1wc5.bir] Well, I love the word! It' s it' s quite a funny word when you, when you' re sitting and look at it. [1wc5.air] LOVE: generic I love the smell of onions. (no examples in corpus) object [bad114002] Stance Differences in American and British English 14

This pattern suggests that stance marker differences need to be examined on a case-by-case basis in order to pinpoint the differences between the dialects. Frequently using LOVE in a generic sense may be a contributing factor in Americans appearing to be more direct in expressing emotions. A similar pattern is evident with the use of HATE. Both Americans and British use HATE in breaking bad news and for inanimate objects, but the corpus shows only Americans using it for humans. Table 12 illustrates this point.

Table 12. American and British usage of HATE Context American Usage British Usage HATE to tell I said Bill just double check these I hate to tell you this but the er … the figures cause, cause I hate to tell you weather is pretty this year. but I didn’ t even check them. [1smry130.out] [aad151001] HATE: inanimate I hate molasses ‘cos that’ s all we had I’ m breaking up the spaghetti cos I when we were kids. [bad111601] hate it in long lengths! [1mc3.suf] HATE: human God I hate you for that. [bad122701] (no examples in corpus) A: What’ s wrong with that? B: I hate Rush [bf131202]

Again, American usage may appear to be more direct and overpowering than British usage. The StanceSearch program may be able to point to where such differences lie, but is of less help in identifying such subtle differences as uses with human and inanimate topics. Evaluating the nature of the stance differences between American and British English requires a great deal more qualitative analysis of such data in order to be understood thoroughly.

Stance Differences in American and British English 15

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