Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-t5pn6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-24T15:51:26.400Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The differences behind the similarities, or: why Americans and Britons don't know what the other is talking about

American and British English share names for many things, but do they have the same meanings?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 June 2016

Extract

In the first article in this series (Murphy 2016), I recounted Geoff Pullum's (2014) dismissal of British-American linguistic differences as ‘mostly nouns’. From a theoretical linguist's position, nouns can seem simpler and less interesting than other parts of speech, since concrete noun senses are fairly self-contained. Compare a noun like cup to an adjective like big. You can picture a cup in and of itself, but in imagining big we need to think about things that could be big. And what we mean by big changes depending on which thing we are talking about. Since the meaning of cup does not have to interact with other words in order to get its meaning, investigating concrete nouns is a low priority for many linguistic semanticists. It can be ‘difficult to distinguish where the discussion of a noun's sense stops and where discussion of its extension (the things it refers to) begins’ (Murphy 2010: 149), and so that aspect of meaning is often left to philosophers and psychologists: What does love mean, really? or How do you know which things to call green?

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th edn. 2015. Online at: https://ahdictionary.com (Accessed 15 March 2016).Google Scholar
Collins English Dictionary online. http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/ (Accessed 15 March 2016).Google Scholar
Davies, Mark. 2013. Corpus of Global Web-Based English: 1.9 billion words from speakers in 20 countries. Online at http://corpus.byu.edu/glowbe/. (Accessed 15 March 2016).Google Scholar
Merriam-Webster Dictionary online. n.d. http://www.merriam-webster.com/ (Accessed 15 March 2016).Google Scholar
Murphy, M. L. (Lynneguist). 2006–. Separated by a Common Language (blog). Online at: <http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.co.uk> (Accessed 15 March 2016).+(Accessed+15+March+2016).>Google Scholar
Murphy, M. L. 2010. Lexical meaning. Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Murphy, M. L. 2014. Sandwiches, more particularly bacon sandwiches. Separated by a Common Language (blog). Online at <http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/sandwiches-more-particularly-bacon.html> (Accessed 15 March 2016).+(Accessed+15+March+2016).>Google Scholar
Murphy, M. L. 2016. ‘(Un)separated by a common language?English Today 32, 5659.Google Scholar
Oxford Dictionaries. 2016. Online at <http://www.oxforddictionaries.com> (Accessed 15 March 2016).+(Accessed+15+March+2016).>Google Scholar
Oxford English Dictionary. 2016. Online at <http://oed.com> (Accessed 15 March 2016).+(Accessed+15+March+2016).>Google Scholar
Pullum, G. K. 2014. ‘Undivided by a Common Language’. Lingua Franca (blog), Chronicle of Higher Education, 17 March. Online at <http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2014/03/17/undivided-by-a-common-language/> (Accessed 14 March 2016).+(Accessed+14+March+2016).>Google Scholar
Shaw, G. B. 1916. Preface. Pygmalion. New York: Brentano.Google Scholar
Taylor, J. R. 2003. Linguistic Categorization, 3rd edn. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar