Having studied attitudes towards usage problems such as the notorious
split infinitive or the ubiquitous literally in
British English as part of my doctoral thesis, I was intrigued by
the sheer lack of scientific studies investigating such attitudes.
What was even more intriguing was to discover that the same field
and the same usage problems seem to have received a different
treatment in the United States of America. While my search for
previously conducted usage attitude studies in Great Britain has
largely remained fruitless, besides two notable exceptions which I
will discuss in detail below (see Section 3), a similar search for
American usage attitude studies resulted in a different picture.
Considerably more such studies seem to have been conducted in the US
than in Great Britain. On top of cultural and linguistic differences
between these two nations, it seems as if they also hold different
attitudes towards studying attitudes towards usage problems. Now the
following question arises: why do we find such contradictory
scientific traditions in these two countries? In this paper, I will
provide an overview of a selection of American and British usage
attitude studies. Taking into account differences between the
American and British studies with regard to the number of usage
problems studied, the populations surveyed and the methods applied,
I will attempt to capture manifestations of two seemingly diverging
attitudes towards the study of usage problems. By doing so, I will
provide a possible explanation for the lack of attention being paid
to usage attitudes in Great Britain.
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