“Negation and Speech Style in Professional American English”

This paper explores various negative constructions in the Corpus of Spoken Professional American English (CSPAE) with a particular focus on their different behaviours in the four settings: White House, Faculty meetings, committee of mathematics and committee of reading.

The language of the White House press briefings, which is supposed to be the most formal of the four, unexpectedly shows a fairly frequent attestation of negation — negation occurs more commonly in informal style than in formal style of English –, and this may be due to the interactive nature of the setting. This paper also demonstrates that the frequency of negation is in part due to the common occurrence of know, think, want and “be sure“, which are more strongly inclined to be negated in the White House than in the other settings. The last of the expressions is slightly more favoured by female speakers than male speakers.

Other findings include that negative constructions with the negative adverb not tend to occur more frequently in exploratory settings, i.e. committee meetings, than in expository settings, i.e. the White House and faculty meetings. Likewise, the negative contraction in the form n’t is more commonly attested in the committee meetings than in the White House and faculty meetings. These results are largely in keeping with previous studies.

Related publications

• Iyeiri, Yoko, Michiko Yaguchi, and Hiroko Okabe. 2004. “To be different fromor to be different than in Present-day American English: A Study of Style and Gender Differences Using the Corpus of Spoken Professional American-English”. English Today 20(3): 29-33.
• Iyeiri, Yoko, Michiko Yaguchi, & Hiroko Okabe. 2005. “Gender and Style: The Discourse Particle like in the Corpus of Spoken Professional American English”. English Corpus Studies 12: 37-51.
• Iyeiri, Yoko & Michiko Yaguchi. 2009. “Relative and Interrogative who/whom in Contemporary Professional American English”, in Germanic Languages and Linguistic Universals, ed. John Ole Askedal, Ian Roberts, Tomonori Matsushita & Hiroshi Hasegawa, pp. 177-91. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
• Yaguchi, Michiko, Yoko Iyeiri, and Yasumasa Baba. 2010. “Speech Style and Gender Distinctions in the Use of very and real/really: An Analysis of the Corpus of Spoken Professional American English”. Journal of Pragmatics 42: 585-97.
• Iyeiri, Yoko, Michiko Yaguchi & Yasumasa Baba. 2011. “Principal Component Analysis of Turn-initial Words in Spoken Interactions”. Literary and Linguistic Computing 26: 139-152.
• Iyeiri, Yoko, Michiko Yaguchi, and Yasumasa Baba. 2013. “Try to do and try and do Again: Verb Complementation in Spoken American English”. Kyoto Working Papers in English and General Linguistics 2: Special Issue in Honour of Professor Keinsei Sugayama on the Occasion of his 60th Birthday,ed. Michiko Yaguchi, Hiroyuki Takagi, Kairi Igarashi, Tsutomu Watanabe, Takafumi Maekawa, and Taiki Yoshimura, pp. 265-79, Tokyo: Kaitakusha.