A couple (of) changes in the ‘Brown family’: British and US English compared

Abstract

This investigation uses the ‘Brown family’ corpora to investigate changes in US and British English involving the noun couple, which has developed a quantifi er meaning similar to ‘few’. The four corpora were developed in order to compare British and US English from the 1960s with data 30 years on, from the 1990s. The main fi nding is that US English leads the change. Although the corpora give some useful indicators for comparison purposes, couple is a low frequency item, and does not occur often enough for quantitative comparisons.