INTRODUCTION
The purpose of our project is to find and analyze conversational features and discover if there are any differences between American and British English. In order to achieve our aim, we have selected as a corpus two chapters of distinct TV series: The first one from the American series ‒Six Feet Under‒ and the other one from the British series – Teachers. Our corpus contains approximately 12000 words, each script having around 6000 words. Both series belong to comedy genre, with adult characters of similar age and social status. Both series reflect the real use of language in their respective societies. They were released in similar dates, between 2001 and 2002. Six Feet Under is a black comedy-drama of a group of people, who…show more content… Δ Don't wanna go to school tomorrow. (Teachers) Δ See what I mean? (Teachers) Δ You think I set the fire? (Six Feet Under) As Biber et al. state, medial ellipsis is the less frequent phenomenon, and so we have noted that: we have found 3 medial ellipsis in Teachers (a 0,05% of the total quantity of words) and 6 in Six Feet Under (a 0,1%). I can Δ if you want me to though. (Teachers) I Δ just assumed… (Six Feet Under) In final (post-operator) ellipsis, the words which follow the operator are usually omitted. It can also appear after an infinitive and a wh-word. We have found 41 final ellipsis in Teachers (representing this a 0,68 of the total quantity of words), and 24 in Six Feet Under (a 0,4%). Because I know she has Δ. (Teachers) Why would she Δ? (Six Feet Under)
Figure 1. Table extracted from Biber et al.: Ellipsis. 3
Biber et al. ellipsis’ findings (as it can be observed in Figure 1 (above): according to the distribution of the three types of ellipsis) show that the occurrence per million word is approximately similar to our findings. However, there is not a coincidence in American initial ellipsis (which occurs more frequently in our corpus), as well as in the overall. This data, in spite of the difference with initial ellipsis, shows a contrast with the popular view of
