On Speak to and Talk to: A Corpora-Based Analysis

Authors

  • Namkil Kang Far East University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.17507/tpls.1207.03

Keywords:

Movie Corpus, TV Corpus, BNC, COCA

Abstract

The ultimate goal of this paper is to compare speak to with talk to in four corpora. In the Movie Corpus (Movie Corpus (MC). 20, January 2022. Online https://english-corpora.org /movies/), talk to was preferable to speak to in the films of six countries (America, the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland). It is worth mentioning that in the Movie Corpus (Movie Corpus (MC). 20, January 2022. Online https://english-corpora.org /movies/), speak to (2,620 tokens) and talk to (18,667 tokens) was the most preferred types in the 2010s. In the TV Corpus (TV Corpus (TVC). 20, January 2022. Online https://english-corpora.org /tv/), talk to is preferable to speak to in six countries’ (America, the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland) TV programs. It is noteworthy that in the TV Corpus (TV Corpus (TVC). 20, January 2022. Online https://english-corpora.org /tv/), speak to (8,279 tokens) and talk to (59,703 tokens) reached a peak in the 2010s. In the BNC (British National Corpus (BNC). 20, January 2022. Online https://corpus.byu.edu/bnc), the types speak to and talk to show the same pattern in three genres, whereas they show a different pattern in four genres. That is, speak to is 42.85% the same as talk to in their ranking. Finally, the COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). 20, January 2022. Online https://corpus.byu.edu/coca) clearly shows that 42.85% of forty two nouns are the collocations of both speak to and talk to.

References

British National Corpus (BNC). 20, January 2022. Online https://corpus.byu.edu/bnc

Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). 20, January 2022. Online https://corpus.byu.edu/coca

Kang, N. (2021). A Corpora-based Analysis of the Collocations of May as Well and Might as Well. Theory and Practice in Language Studies 11 (11). 1343-1353.

Movie Corpus (MC). 20, January 2022. Online https://english-corpora.org /movies/

Murphy, R. (2016). Grammar in Use. Cambridge University Press. Singapore.

Murphy, R. (2019). English Grammar in Use. Cambridge University Press. New York.

TV Corpus (TVC). 20, January 2022. Online https://english-corpora.org /tv/

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Published

2022-07-04

Issue

Section

Articles