British and American English grammar in contrast: a selected survey

This paper is concerned with the American and British English grammar in contrast. More particularly, it is an overview of Rohdenburg and Schlüter’s edited volume One Language, Two Grammars? Differences between American and British English (2009). It starts with a selected literature overview, in which we realize that the available empirically based studies are scarce and lack in-depth explanation. Afterwards we continue with a general overview of contrasts that are discussed in Rohdenburg and Schlüter (2009): comparative forms, positioning of adverbs, reflexives, compressed noun modification, infinitive vs. gerund, present perfect vs. preterite, subjunctive, mandative subjunctive, tag questions, and pragmatic functions of adverbs. In the next part, we focus on the detailed discussion of the three selected grammar contrasts: compound verbs, the formation of the preterite and the past participle, and nominal complements. Our corpus study is based on the examples chosen from the One Language, Two Grammars? Differences between American and British English (2009) and compared to the results given in the corpus of Global Web-Based English