Get on with and Continue with: Similarity Analysis

This article provides an in-depth similarity analysis of the phrases get on with and continue with using data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), the British National Corpus (BNC), and ChatGPT. A key finding is that in COCA, the two phrases share a 33.33% similarity in ranking analysis, whereas in BNC, their similarity is 0%. In COCA, get on with is most similar to continue with in the newspaper genre and least similar in TV/movies. Conversely, in BNC, their closest similarity occurs in magazines and their greatest divergence in fiction. Standard deviation analysis further highlights differences in frequency. In COCA, get on with has a standard deviation of 294.02, indicating a frequency range of 199.48 to 787.52, while continue with has a standard deviation of 194.4, with a range of 163.98 to 552.78. Although their frequency correlation is not statistically significant, COCA shows a weak positive correlation, while BNC reveals a weak negative correlation. Notably, in neither corpus does the frequency of get on with significantly affect continue with. Additionally, eight of their top 20 collocations overlap, reflecting a 40% similarity in usage. Overall, the findings suggest minimal similarity between these phrases, with clear distinctions between American and British English. These insights contribute to a deeper understanding of how phrase usage varies across different linguistic and cultural contexts.