This essay is a corpus based study, aimed at determining which euphemisms for death American and British English have in common as well as which might be more specific for either of these two varieties of the English language. The study also shows the frequency in use for all of the chosen euphemisms and briefly mentions when they first were used. Six euphemisms concerning death and dying were selected out of numerous available expressions: deceased, pass away, perish, demise, the departed and fade away. In addition, the word die was also included in the investigation with the purpose of determining if euphemisms are more common. Cobuild Direct Corpus serves as the main source of the investigation and comparisons are made between the National Public Radio broadcasts and US books corpora for the American variety of the English language and the BBC World Service radio broadcasts and the UK books corpora for the British counterpart. In addition, the British English transcribed informal speech corpus was included to display the frequency in use in British spoken English. The analysis concludes that the use of euphemisms for death is not very common, which implies that people in our day of age are not as afraid of death as what is claimed to have been the case during earlier years.

This essay aims to shed light on the prevalence of the to + adverb + verb and to not + verb split infinitives in American English, both in a historical perspective and in present day usage, and how it varies in different contexts where different levels of formality are expected. Although students are taught to avoid splitting constructions, numerous grammarians and linguists question this prescriptive viewpoint. Two extensive corpora, the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), were used to gather data. The results revealed how the frequency of the split infinitive was, and still is, rising rapidly, and becoming more and more a standard and accepted feature in American English. The most common context in which to find a split infinitive was that of informal spoken language. However, it was in the most formal of settings, that of academic texts, where the largest increase in prevalence of the split infinitive was seen.

Phonetic mergers in American English have been studied throughout the last half century. Previous research has contributed social and phonetic explanations to the understanding of front and back vowel mergers before /l/, front vowel mergers before nasals and phonetically unconditioned back vowel mergers. Using data from the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States (LAGS) and the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States (LAMSAS), this thesis examines the spread of the front vowel mergers in Mary and merry and the back vowel mergers in horse and hoarse. The two complementary sources of data allow for a social and phonetic approach to the examination of the merger.

Spelling development is a linguistic process which involves the interaction of phonological, orthographic, and morphological knowledge (Bahr, Silliman, & Berninger, in press). It is also clear these linguistic factors are influenced by a person's dialect. Previous research has indicated that use of African American English (AAE) does influence spelling performance (Kohler, Bahr, Silliman, Bryant, Apel, & Wilkinson, 2007); however, few studies have considered how dialect use influences spelling as a function of spelling task (i.e., real vs. non-word tasks), error category (phonological, orthographic, or morphological) or grade. A secondary goal was to note if dialectal or developmental errors predominated in the noted misspellings. The Phonological, Orthographic, and Morphological Assessment of Spelling (POMAS, Silliman, Bahr, & Peters, 2006) was used to provide a fine-grained analysis of the spelling errors of 80 typically developing African American children in grades 1 (n = 39) and 3 (n = 41). These children were screened for language ability and they were determined to be AAE speakers by observing their use of phonological and/or morphosyntactic dialect features when retelling a story. Age-appropriate real word and non-word spelling tasks were developed which incorporated common features of AAE. A three-way ANOVA revealed that differences in error frequency were dependent upon word type, error type and grade. On the real word spelling task, children in both grades made more orthographic errors than phonological or morphological errors. On the non-word spelling task, students in both grades made fewer orthographic errors and students in grade 3 made significantly more phonological errors, while the number of phonological errors noted remained fairly constant across tasks for the children in grade 1. Common misspelling patterns revealed developmental errors, as well as errors attributed to AAE. A closer look at the occurrence of AAE features revealed that first graders were more likely to reflect dialectal patterns in their spelling than the third graders. This is possibly due to differences in exposure to the academic register and experience in code-switching. Finally, the real words elicited more AAE features than non-words suggesting that phonetic and linguistic contexts might influence the occurrence and use of AAE.

Though previous research has documented the Southern Vowel Shift (SVS) in Alabama and Tennessee, none has focused on Mississippi. Also, the majority of research has focused on European-Americans. In this study, data was collected from women from northern and central Mississippi, with central residents evenly recruited from urban and rural areas. Of these, 15 were European-American and 19 were African-American. Participants read a word list including target vowels in the b_d frame. F1, F2, and vector length were analyzed to determine to what extent participants exhibited the SVS and Back Vowel Fronting. For the SVS, there were effects such that central residents shifted more than northern, rural residents shifted more than urban, and African-American residents shifted more than European-American. European-American women fronted /u/ and /o/ more than African-American women. These results suggest that African-American women from Mississippi do participate in the SVS but are not fronting their back vowels.

Many teachers, test designers, textbook writers, and instructional designers turn to books written by usage experts to determine what is correct standard written American English. Unfortunately, though, experts often disagree about what is correct and what is incorrect, and this disagreement can create problems with validity when people create and assess instruction about usage. One way to discover the rules of standard English usage is to describe what writers actually do in printed, edited English. Researchers can access large collections of standard English through digital text archives, which can be searched electronically. The text archives for this study were taken from EBSCO and ProQuest digital libraries and divided into three different registers: (a) newspapers, (b) magazines, and (c) scholarly journals. This study examines 30 representative items of controversial usage; such as "a lot" or "alot," "between you and I" or "between you and me," "had proved" or "had proven"; to determine the actual occurrence in these three registers of standard written American English. The results list the percentage of use in each register, as well as the total averaged percentage of use in all three registers. Items showing 90% to 100% usage in the total averaged percentages are considered standard English, but items showing 90% to 95% usage are borderline cases that should be monitored for future use. If a variant form is used more than 10% of the time, then it should be considered a possible alternative usage in dictionaries, in text books, and in tests. This study shows the results of using corpus linguistics to answer questions about usage in standard American English.

This study examines the effects of experience in German on the categorical perception of German rounded vowels, namely /uː/, /ʊ/, /oː/, /ɔ/, /yː/, /ʏ/, /øː/, and /œ/, by native speakers of American English (AE). Of special interest is whether more experience in German leads to more accurate perception of German front rounded vowels, namely /yː/, /ʏ/, /øː/, and /œ/, which do not have correlates in American English and are well known to cause perceptual problems for native AE speakers (Strange, Bohn, Trent, & Nishi, 2004). Subjects in this study were students at Brigham Young University that were divided into 4 experimental groups: students at the end of first-semester German with no residency in a German-speaking country (101 group); students at the end of third-semester German with no residency (201 group); students in third-year or higher German courses with less than 4 months of residency (300+ group); students in third-year or higher courses with 16 or more months of residency (300+Resi group). A control group of native German speakers also participated. Subjects completed a forced-choice identification task in which they selected the German word they thought they heard. The results of the task indicate that experience in German did affect native AE-speaking subjects' overall identification accuracy of German rounded vowels. In particular, a statistically significant difference was found between the 101 and 300+Resi groups for all German rounded vowels except /uː/ and /ʊ//, suggesting that experience significantly affected AE subjects' perception of all of these vowels except /uː/ and /ʊ/.

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This thesis aims to investigate the differences between what collocations are used for ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ in films and contemporary culture. The comparison spans through different decades and the decades will also be compared and analysed. The thesis will investigate if the collocates reflect the societal change and if so, can the results relate to existing power structures/gender roles? The background for the thesis consists of information about marriage history, films and their influence on culture, what a collocation is and previous research on collocation. The method used for this thesis was Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies which includes both corpus studies and discourse analysis. Consequently, a more in-depth understanding of the results and tables were given. To classify the collocates collected from the Movie Corpus (which represents movies) and the Corpus of Historical American English (representing culture) the results are presented Caldas-Coulthard and Moon’s categorisation schema. After this, in the discussion, the proportional distribution is presented because the corpora are different sizes and this way they can be compared correctly. The conclusion is that movies reflect culture somewhat, but it lacks in some areas. However, some patterns can be found. ‘Wife’ and ‘husband’ are discussed differently, and the difference in collocates shows that. Moreover, the results seem to reflect typical stereotypes that do exist and has existed.