Chapter 15. ‘Well it’s not for me to advise you, of course...’: Advice and advise in the British National Corpus of English

In this paper we take a closer look at the English lexemes of advice and advise. In previous work on the discourse of advice-giving, researchers have focused on the various linguistic realizations of giving and receiving advice. Here, the focus is on the usage of these two English lexemes in order to find out more about their semantics and pragmatics. We take a look at the etymology of advice and advise in order to gain possible insights into its development in language use. The main part of this paper consists of quantitative and qualitative analyses based on the British National Corpus (BNC). We highlight frequently occurring collocations of advice and analyze the distribution of various meanings of advise represented in the corpus.