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Analysis on Conversation Features. Differenfes Between British and American English

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INTRODUCTION The purpose of our project is to find and analyze conversational features and discover if there are any differences between American and British English. In order to achieve our aim, we have selected as a corpus two chapters of distinct TV series: The first one from the American series ‒Six Feet Under‒ and the other one from the British series – Teachers. Our corpus contains approximately 12000 words, each script having around 6000 words. Both series belong to comedy genre, with adult characters of similar age and social status. Both series reflect the real use of language in their respective societies. They were released in similar dates, between 2001 and 2002. Six Feet Under is a black comedy-drama of a group of people, who …show more content…

6. Conversation employs a vernacular range of expressions It usually takes place in an informal context. That is why contractions, double negation, and use of extended forms stated as incorrect by the prescriptive grammarians can be found. Also in this group would be included regional dialects. 2 ANALYSIS In this part we are going to analyze the two scripts we have chosen. We have counted and classified the conversational features. In order to support the results, some tables are included. Both texts have similar characteristics, so we have explained each feature showing some examples taken from our corpus. 1. Conversation takes place in a shared context Speakers share a lot of contextual knowledge in conversation. It is marked grammatically by a very high frequency of pronouns (as contrasted with a very low frequency of nouns), deictic words, substitute ellipsis and pro-forms, and non-clausal or fragmentary components such as inserts. The most remarkable feature is the ellipsis (signaled here by Δ). This feature is a way of simplifying grammar through omission. We have distinguished three types according to the place of occurrence they have in the sentence. Initial words substituted by initial ellipsis (also called situational ellipsis) can be easily understood from the situational

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