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There are mainly two ways of comparing adjectives in English: the analytic and the synthetic. The analytic way is to use more and most (for example difficult, more difficult, most difficult). The synthetic, or inflectional, way is to add the endings –er and –est (for instance fast, faster, fastest). During the last twelve centuries the way of forming comparisons in English has evolved from predominately synthetic to the point where both inflections and analytic forms are used. Today many adjectives are almost always compared either synthetically or analytically (e.g. fast and difficult respectively), but sometimes we have two alternatives; for example, we can choose between more polite and politer. The author has three aims with this paper: firstly, to examine how adjectives in English are compared today; secondly, to determine how well the descriptions in modern grammars agree with authentic written English; thirdly, to see whether there have been any recent changes in the way of indicating comparison. This is a quantitative study. A corpus investigation was undertaken: some one hundred common adjectives in two British newspapers, The Guardian and The Observer, from 1990–91 and 2005 that vary in their way of expressing comparison were studied. The results were compared with six grammars from the last five decades. After the data collection, the chi square test was applied, showing how statistically significant the changes between 1990–91 and 2005 are. Judging from the data in this study, the synthetic comparison seems to be becoming less common. The author also concludes that the comparison of adjectives in contemporary British English varies considerably.

The aim of this paper is to find out what variety of English pupils in upper secondary schools are using, British English or American English, but also to see if there are any difference between boys and girls and if they are aware of their usage. British English used to be the only variety allowed in school, but now other varieties are taught as well and American English is gaining ground in Swedish schools. According to the curriculum, it is a part of the subject of English in upper secondary schools to study the different varieties and be aware of them. This study took place in Swedish upper secondary schools in the Stockholm area where 108 pupils in university preparing programs translated sentences with words that differ in British and American English, filled in a questionnaire which tested spelling and were also recorded when reading sentences. The survey showed that the tendency among these pupils is that they use American English more than British English in both vocabulary and pronunciation. The study also indicated that many pupils tend to mix their usage between the varieties, especially the girls. It was also seen that boys seem to be more aware of what variety they use.

The two major varieties of English are American and British English. In Swedish compulsory school both varieties are taught. This essay examines the preferences and attitudes of pupils in 9th grades towards the two varieties, and if there are any gender differences. Previous research has shown that pupils are becoming more and more positive towards American English than they have been in earlier studies. This essay is based on a quantitative study carried out through questionnaires handed-out to 84 9th graders. The results show that the pupils prefer American English in speaking and for educational purposes. However, British English is viewed as more intelligent, professional, beautiful and correct. These findings mostly correspond to previous research but also show some contrasting features such as pupils wanting to speak British English rather than American English. / <p>engelska</p>

The goal of this dissertation was to investigate experimentally the phonetic qualities of the palatalized consonants of Standard Bulgarian. The term ‘palatalized’ refers to consonants (e.g., [tʲ, dʲ]) which are articulated with a secondary palatal gesture superimposed on the primary gesture associated with their plain counterparts (e.g., [t, d]). An acoustic study investigated the claim (Horálek, 1950; Choi, 1998; Ignateva-Tsoneva, 2008) that the palatalized consonants of Standard Bulgarian have undergone depalatalization, which was defined as the decomposition of a secondary palatal [ ʲ ] gesture into a palatal glide [j]. A cross-language comparison was performed. Russian (e.g., [tʲulʲ], ‘silk net’) and British English (e.g., [tju:lip], ‘tulip’) data served as a baseline against which the Bulgarian data (e.g., [tʲul], ‘silk net’) was evaluated. Subjects’ productions of words were recorded for acoustic analyses. The F1, F2 and F3 frequencies of the critical segments were analyzed with a Smoothing Spline ANOVA (Gu, 2002). The analyses indicated that Bulgarian palatalized consonants were identical to those of the Russian palatalized consonants, but different from the consonant-palatal glide sequences of British English. It was concluded that Bulgarian palatalized consonants have not undergone depalatalization. A perception study employed two variations of the gating task (Grosjean, 1980): audio-only and audio-visual. The results of the audio-only experiment indicated that Bulgarian and Russian listeners needed only the information associated with the palatalization portion of the consonant to identify it as palatalized. Bulgarian subjects did not need the transitions with the following vowel (Tilkov, 1983) to identify a consonant as palatalized. The Russian subjects of Richey’s (2000) experiment did not need the formant transitions either to identify the secondary palatal gesture. These findings provide further evidence that the palatalized consonants of the Standard Bulgarian have not undergone depalatalization. The purpose of the audio-visual experiment was to investigate if Bulgarian and Russian listeners use visual information to identify palatalized consonants. The results from this experiment were not as clear cut as those from the audio-only experiment. Factors such as insufficient visual information at earlier gates, as well as attentional load are being considered as possible confounds. In addition, an improved methodology for an audio-visual perception study is outlined. Experimental evidence from the acoustic and perception studies points to similarities in the phonetic shape of the palatalized consonants of Bulgarian and Russian. However, the phonological distribution of these segments is very different in the respective languages. I argue against a one-to-one mapping between the phonetic and phonological representations of the Bulgarian palatalized consonants. Based on distributional evidence, I propose that at the level of phonology they consist of a sequence of /CjV/.

La tesi si concentra sugli influssi lessicali che le lingue indiane hanno esercitato sulla lingua inglese sia in prospettiva diacronica sia sincronica. La prima parte dell'elaborato indaga, tramite l'impiego di uno strumento lessicografico, l'Oxford English Dictionary edizione on-line, la presenza in inglese di prestiti veri e propri, ma anche di derivati e composti, sorti in seguito al contatto tra l'inglese le lingue indiane a partire dal Sedicesimo secolo e fino ai nostri giorni, arrivando a individuare 1791 forme lessicali. La seconda parte intende verificare l'effettiva presenza, la frequenza d'uso e il significato di tali prestiti, composti e derivati nel British English contemporaneo, avvalendosi degli strumenti offerti dalla linguistica dei corpora. Il corpus di riferimento impiegato in questa seconda fase della ricerca è Bank of English. L'elaborato, oltre a delineare lo scenario storico culturale di riferimento, mette in evidenza le procedure metodologiche impiegate, e ricostruisce l'impianto teorico sulle questioni di interferenze tra codici linguistici, lingue in contatto e prestiti lessicali, riferendosi ai maggiori e più recenti studi in materia. / The research focuses on lexical influences exerted by Indian languages on British English as a result of linguistic contacts between Great Britain and India. Both diachronic and synchronic perspectives are taken into consideration in evaluating the extent of such lexical influences. The first part of the research analyses the presence of words of East Indian origin in English by means of the Oxford English Dictionary, on-line edition, be these words authentic lexical borrowings, or derivatives or compounds arisen as a consequence of such linguistic contacts. The historical period taken into consideration goes from the 16th century till nowadays. The second part of the research aims to verify the actual presence, frequency of usage and meaning of such words in contemporary British English by means of a linguistic corpora tool, namely the Bank of English by Harper Collins. The historical and cultural background of the relationships between Great Britain and India, as well as the theoretical background about linguistic interferences as a whole are also illustrated, with reference to the most authoritative and recent studies.

The aim of this study has been to find out whether the authors of English textbooks in two EU countries, Poland and Sweden, view diversity and promote World Englishes in the same way or whether there are any differences. The attempt has been made to analyse reading texts in the two textbooks for teaching English as a foreign language, a Polish and a Swedish one, in order to see what different Englishes have been promoted there, and to which extent they are represented in both textbooks. For the purpose of this analysis, Marko Modiano´s descriptive model of World Englishes has been used. The study has shown that the Polish textbook focuses mostly on British and American English, and to a great degree on European countries where English is taught as a foreign language. On the other hand, the Swedish textbook promotes both British and American English, as well as major and local varieties of English, but does not mention European countries, except Great Britain obviously, almost at all. World Englishes are present both in the Polish and in the Swedish textbook but the textbook authors take slightly different approaches in promoting them.

This study aims to find out the culturally different conceptualizations of congratulation in British culture and tebrik and kutlama in Turkish culture using a corpus approach and to formulate cultural scripts for these three performative verbs using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage Approach. More specifically, the study aims to reveal the contexts where the target speech act is used and to uncover the kinds of strategies/components employed in these situations. To be able to collect the targeted data, the study begins with the monolingual and bilingual dictionary definitions of the performative verbs (i.e., congratulate, tebrik etmek and kutlamak) and then follows a corpus approach whereby the performative verbs and their various lexical forms are searched for in various corpora (i.e., BYU-BNC, MTC, Google). In total, 47 dictionaries are looked up and 442 contexts of congratulation, 339 contexts of tebrik and 348 contexts of kutlama are collected from the newspaper and blog genres in the three corpora. The analyses of the data aim to uncover the qualitative and quantitative features of congratulation, tebrik and kutlama in British and Turkish cultures. The results of the study show that there are some cultural differences as well as similarities in the conceptualization of the speech act of congratulation in terms of its contexts of use and strategies. The findings also demonstrate the usefulness of the corpus approach in studying speech acts and their conceptualisation. The thesis aims to contribute to the areas of foreign language education, intercultural/cross-cultural communication and pragmatics.

Collective nouns are a category of nouns that refer to a group of people or things. This group of nouns has the special characteristic that when in singular form, they can be followed by either a singular or a plural verb. This feature of collective nouns has attracted a great deal of attention from researchers and traditional grammarians, who in the last few decades have tried to explain this phenomenon by investigating different perspectives on it, thereby taking into consideration morphological, syntactic and semantic, as well as variational and discourse-specific differences (Biber et al, 1999; Levin, 2001; Depraetere, 2003). One of the main assumptions that has been suggested in the literature is that collective nouns have specific concord preferences, allowing for either a singular or a plural verb or both. Another assumption that has also been invoked is that when collective nouns are part of a complex noun phrase, as for instance in the phrase the rest of (the) society, in which the collective is part of the of-phrase, the plural tends to be used. Based on these two assumptions, the aim of this thesis is to further investigate, firstly whether a singular or a plural verb is used after expressions where a collective noun is being modified by a quantifying noun expression (e.g. the rest of, part of), secondly whether the concord preferences the collective nouns have an influence on the verbal concord and finally if there is any difference between the two main varieties of English, namely British and American English. Since this is a topic of actual language use, the methods used in corpus linguistic research are also employed in the thesis. More specifically, by looking at the instances of quantifying noun expressions modifying collective nouns as well as the frequency with which such constructions occur in two different corpora, the enTenTen13 and the GloWbE (Corpus of Global Web-Based English), the thesis seeks to answer the aforementioned questions. From the analysis of the data it was concluded that in some cases the concord preferences of the collective nouns influenced the verb form following the complex noun phrases, whereas in others these preferences did not determine the selection of the verb form. Syntactic, semantic as well as contextual factors seem to also influence the selection of the verb form. Furthermore, variational differences occurred, since in British English the plural was more often used with collective nouns that prefer the plural concord over the singular one or that are more variable in their concord patterns, whereas in American English the singular was the preferred choice in all cases.

Swedish school pupils are taught English from a very young age. Many speak English at a very high level thanks to this and also thanks to readily available television programmes in English, mostly from America but also from Britain. Some, including Marko Modiano argue that the English spoken in Sweden could be a new variety. There is some evidence in support of this in the form of previous studies showing to what degree American and British English is mixed by Swedes. The present study aims at exploring if there are any recurring patterns in the way Swedish upper secondary school students mix American and British English as well as possible underlying reasons. This was done by recording 32 informants at an upper secondary school in Stockholm while reading a list of words and sentences designed to elicit phonetic markers that separate American English from British English. The data from the recordings is complemented by a short questionnaire. Here the informants are asked about their preference for English varieties and what they believe the preference of English varieties is for their teacher, the school, their textbooks as well as what they watch on television and if they have ever been or would like to go to an English speaking country. Concerning whether or not the informants mix American and British English or not, the results clearly show that most believe they do, although most of them seem to favour American English on the whole. There seems to be an overall tendency to use rhotic /r/ and there were some differences between male and female informants. Looking at the results of the present study compared to previous studies there is a connection in that formal text types like word lists elicit more British English than less formal text types do. Concerning what they watch on television, nearly all informants watch American television shows and this could be, in part, responsible for the tendency to favour the American variety. Regarding other influences, there was some uncertainty, especially when they were asked what they believed was preferred in the textbooks and by their teachers. Though it seems most believe that British English is preferred over American English except for the school in general where most believe that both varieties are preferred equally.