The collocates of get in British and American English

Details

Supervisors

Gilquin, Gaëtanelle

Faculty

Faculté de philosophie, arts et lettres

Degree label

Master [120] en langues et lettres modernes, orientation générale, à finalité didactique

Abstract

The objective of this master’s thesis is to identify and examine the collocates of ɢᴇᴛ across two varieties of English, namely British and American English. An analysis of the collocates of ɢᴇᴛ was carried out on data from the fiction section of the BNC and COCA in order to identify the similarities and differences between these subcorpora in terms of frequency and MI score of the collocates. The quantitative analysis reveals differences across the two varieties of English: there are significantly more collocates in American English based on the frequency criteria. From a qualitative perspective, the results show a strong tendency shared by the two corpora to use same high-frequency nouns. However, when analysing collocates with high Mi scores, British English shows a tendency to use idiomatic expressions, while American English prefers everyday language. The semantic prosody analysis further highlights that although negative prosodies are dominant in both varieties, American fiction shows a greater toward negative situations. In contrast, British fiction more frequently uses get within contexts involving positive outcomes. These findings reveal that even though British and American share many frequent collocates, differences in usage and semantic prosodic tendencies reflect distinct linguistic and stylistic preferences in the two varieties.