Friday, December 12, 2014

What is the difference in syntax between American and British English?plz ans

With the tremendous influence of the French language upon
English because of the Norman Conquest of 1066 in which William the Conqueror made
French the official language and the language of the nobility, English yet retains
remnants of the French grammatical arrangement of words.  When the Americans began to
develop their own language, they broke from many of the ways of pronunciation and
spelling (e.g. they changed the -re ending of words such as
theatre to theater) and of word order, but the
British retained this order in some cases.


One example of
this syntax is in the word order with adjectives which sometimes mirrors that of
French.  When, for instance, the famous English tennis championship is broadcast on
television, the announcer says, "The Championship Wimbledon."  Whereas American English
would put the noun Wimbledon before the other noun Championship in
order to change Wimbledon to an adjective, British English uses the
French order of placing the adjective after the noun.  This does not occur regularly, of
course, but there are yet remnants of the French influence in England while the
Americans did not retain them as they developed their own
English.


Still another difference that is occurring more
and more in American English is the use of the simple past for an action that has begun
in the past but continues in the present. The English are more insistent upon the usage
of the present perfect which is, of course, the appropriate
tense.

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