Comparative speech-act studies have found that British English directives tend to include the pragmatic marker please at about twice the rate of American English directives. Nevertheless, lexical please is often as frequent in American English corpora as in British ones – indicating that sincere directives are only part of this pragmatic marker’s story. This article reports on British and American please usage in the Corpus of Global Web-based English (GloWbE; Davies 2013). GloWbE shows similar numbers of non-verbal please on American and British websites, but also differences in what please is used for. This contributes to a larger picture of pragmatic variation in which British English uses a more bleached and routine please, whereas American please might be more at home effecting im/politeness in contexts of greater face-threat.

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.

OBJECTIVES/SPECIFIC AIMS: To conduct a preliminary evaluation of the Social and Behavioral Research Best Practices Course. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: Learners are sampled from 5 institutions: University of Michigan, University of Rochester, University of Florida, Boston University, and University of Buffalo. Learners who take the course and consent to be in the study receive a web link to a survey immediately after course completion and at 2–3 months follow up. In addition to demographic information, learners will report their perceptions of usefulness and relevance of the course to their job, their satisfaction with the course and associated job aids, and at follow-up, if and how the course impacted their work. Additional information will be collected from the learning management systems which host the course at each institution. The data collected will include the number of participants who take the course, the number who complete, how many times the course was attempted, and pass rates. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: We anticipate that several hundred learners will take the course by the end of our project. Of learners who agree to participate in the survey, we anticipate that they will find the course useful and relevant to social and behavioral clinical trials and will be satisfied with the course. Information including suggestions about missing content, items or content that were not extremely clear, or any other comments will be collected to iterate and expand the course. DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE OF IMPACT: This course was developed to fill a gap in training in good clinical practice for social and behavioral research. An evaluation of how the training provided in the course impacts the jobs of learners is needed both to ensure that the most relevant information is included in the course as well as to identify ways that the training may contribute to the quality and safety of social and behavioral clinical trials.

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.

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?

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.

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:

Significant new opportunities for astrophysics and cosmology have been identified at low radio frequencies. The Murchison Widefield Array is the first telescope in the southern hemisphere designed specifically to explore the low-frequency astronomical sky between 80 and 300 MHz with arcminute angular resolution and high survey efficiency. The telescope will enable new advances along four key science themes, including searching for redshifted 21-cm emission from the EoR in the early Universe; Galactic and extragalactic all-sky southern hemisphere surveys; time-domain astrophysics; and solar, heliospheric, and ionospheric science and space weather. The Murchison Widefield Array is located in Western Australia at the site of the planned Square Kilometre Array (SKA) low-band telescope and is the only low-frequency SKA precursor facility. In this paper, we review the performance properties of the Murchison Widefield Array and describe its primary scientific objectives.