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"Murphy, M. Lynne"
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Dynamics of English gratitude expression: a corpus-assisted analysis of UK government COVID-19 briefings
With a focus on politicians’ and medical experts’ gratitude expressions in UK government COVID-19 briefings, this research describes how perspective and intensity were modulated in expressing gratitude to realise different pragmatic intentions. This corpus-assisted analysis finds that retrospective or prospective gratitude expression was adopted by the two British elite groups to build solidarity (encouraging) and/or make requests (directing) for protecting public health. Gratitude of varying intensities was expressed (e.g. by highlighting metaphorical dimensions such as WIDTH and DEPTH) to correspond to the importance of a benefit (judged by how much the given benefit matches the receiver’s needs and preferences) and/or to implicitly display the evaluation of the benefactor’s responsibility and efforts. We tentatively formulate a dynamic model of gratitude expression in public discourse and shed light on the metaphorical conceptualisation of English gratitude expression and the power of gratitude expression in boosting social cohesion and directing social actions in a discourse of crisis.
Journal Article
Minding your pleases and thank-yous in Britain and the US
Probably my favourite study of American/British linguistic differences is Gail Jefferson's (2002) paper on no. The research was inspired by a Dutch colleague's suggestion that no can be used as an acknowledgement token for a negative statement - that is, no can be used instead of 'positive' indicators like mm-hmm or yeah to indicate that the listener has heard and understood a negative sentence like I didn't see her. Jefferson's first response to this suggestion was: but English no can't be an emotionally neutral acknowledgement token. And it turned out that she was right - but only for (her native) American English. Examining British telephone conversation data, Jefferson found that 87% of the tokens in response to negative statements were negative (usually no). In the American data, that number was 27%. Americans use negative response tokens less because for them a no response signals not just acknowledgement ('I received your message and understood it'), but affiliation - communicating 'I'd do the same thing' or 'I'm with you on that'. Affiliative no shows an emotional commitment, and people commit themselves less often than they simply acknowledge what's been said. Here's a slightly simplified version of an example from Jefferson's British data.
Journal Article
Key Terms in Semantics
Key Terms in Semantics explains the all the terms and concepts in semantics which students on linguistics and language studies course are likely to encounter during their undergraduate study. The book is organized alphabetically, and fully cross-referenced. The book includes a section on key thinkers in semantics, from Aristotle to Noam Chomsky and will be a valuable desk reference for students throughout their undergraduate course. The final section presents a list of key readings in semantics, to signpost the reader towards classic articles, as well providing a springboard to further study. The book is accessibly written, with complex terms and concepts explained in an easy to understand and approachable manner.
eBook
The differences behind the similarities, or: why Americans and Britons don't know what the other is talking about
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?
Journal Article
(Un)separated by a common language?
Interest in the differences between English in Britain (or more especially England) and the United States supports a small industry, of which I am a small part. But there are those who argue that the differences are so negligible that they are not worth investigating. One of these is University of Edinburgh Professor of General Linguistics Geoffrey Pullum, who wrote a post on the topic for the Lingua Franca blog of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Pullum (2014) concluded:
Looked at seriously, the tiny differences between standard American and standard British English are trivial, barely even worth mentioning.
Pullum was motivated to make this argument for good reasons. He was fighting the exaggeration of the differences and pointing out that Britons and Americans generally understand each other well in spite of whatever differences there are. But at the same time, Pullum's argument rests on oversimplifications, just like the claims that he hopes to counter.
Journal Article
British English? American English? Are there such things?
In the last issue of English Today I argued that while the differences between American and British English may be small, they are innumerable, varied and interesting. But that article (and many of the things I write) invited the question of whether it even makes sense to talk of American English and British English . These labels are extremely problematic on geographic, linguistic and political grounds. Are we justified in using such sloppy terminology? Shouldn't linguists like me know better? Let's look the problems of nomenclature, starting with the eastern side of the Atlantic.
Journal Article
Minding your pleases and thank-yous in Britain and the US
Probably my favourite study of American/British linguistic differences is Gail Jefferson's (2002) paper on no. The research was inspired by a Dutch colleague's suggestion that no can be used as an acknowledgement token for a negative statement – that is, no can be used instead of ‘positive’ indicators like mm-hmm or yeah to indicate that the listener has heard and understood a negative sentence like I didn't see her. Jefferson's first response to this suggestion was: but English no can't be an emotionally neutral acknowledgement token. And it turned out that she was right – but only for (her native) American English. Examining British telephone conversation data, Jefferson found that 87% of the tokens in response to negative statements were negative (usually no). In the American data, that number was 27%. Americans use negative response tokens less because for them a no response signals not just acknowledgement (‘I received your message and understood it’), but affiliation – communicating ‘I'd do the same thing’ or ‘I'm with you on that’. Affiliative no shows an emotional commitment, and people commit themselves less often than they simply acknowledge what's been said. Here's a slightly simplified version of an example from Jefferson's British data.
Journal Article
Minding your please s and thank-you s in Britain and the US
Probably my favourite study of American/British linguistic differences is Gail Jefferson's (2002) paper on no . The research was inspired by a Dutch colleague's suggestion that no can be used as an acknowledgement token for a negative statement – that is, no can be used instead of ‘positive’ indicators like mm-hmm or yeah to indicate that the listener has heard and understood a negative sentence like I didn't see her . Jefferson's first response to this suggestion was: but English no can't be an emotionally neutral acknowledgement token. And it turned out that she was right – but only for (her native) American English. Examining British telephone conversation data, Jefferson found that 87% of the tokens in response to negative statements were negative (usually no ). In the American data, that number was 27%. Americans use negative response tokens less because for them a no response signals not just acknowledgement (‘I received your message and understood it’), but affiliation – communicating ‘I'd do the same thing’ or ‘I'm with you on that’. Affiliative no shows an emotional commitment, and people commit themselves less often than they simply acknowledge what's been said. Here's a slightly simplified version of an example from Jefferson's British data.
Journal Article