Recent grammatical change in written English 1961-1992: some preliminary findings of a comparison of American with British English

Tire quartet of corpora analysed in this paper are the Brown Corpus (AmE, 1961), LOB Corpus (BrE, 1961) Frown Corpus (AmE, 1992) and FLOB Corpus (BrE, 1991). The POS-tagged versions of these matching corpora provide the basis for tracking frequency changes in grammatical usage in written English 1961-1991/2 and for comparing similar changes in AmE and BrE. For example, there have been significant increases in the use of semi-modals, the present progressive, that-relativization, nouns (in particular proper nouns), s-genitives, and verb and negative contractions. Counterbalancing some of these changes, there have been significant decreases in the use of core modals, the passive voice, wh-relativization, and of-genitives. In general, the changes in AmE are more extreme than those in BrE. We discuss these changes in terms of general diachronic processes, particularly socially determined processes such as colloquialization and Americanization.