Abstract:

The distinctive features of British and American English are commonly presented in the coursebooks, grammar-reference books and lexical lists, but it is still important to analyse authentic materials that allow of searching for the features that are salient for one of these varieties. Globalisation and the Internet have caused these differences to diminish. However, it is still important to investigate the similarities and differences between these two main varieties to expose language learners to the variety they want or prefer to study as to their future studies or employment.

The main focus of our research is excerpting one chapter taken from contemporary literary prose written in American English, which will be thoroughly analysed and all the excerpts will be sorted out into specific groups due to their common features and then reasonably classified. The samples in American English will be compared and contrasted with their British-English equivalents to reveal the extent into which lexical items, grammatical patterns and spelling used in American English differ from its original language.

The excerpts will be grouped into particular categories based on criteria related to linguistic analyses. This detailed analysis will reveal some features that are not commonly presented in the grammar-reference books or coursebooks. The word’s meanings will be examined and checked in the online British (Cambridge Dictionary) and American (Merriam-Webster) dictionaries in order to be provided with exact data as this study is carried out by a non-native speaker. Therefore, the study will not be influenced by natives’ attitudes that might be specific due to numerous regional accents of English. The above-mentioned approach seems to be reasonable and objective without any preference for one of the varieties.

Keywords:

American English, contemporary literary prose, linguistic analyses of samples, comparing and contrasting.