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milky

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The British National Corpus revealed that the expression "not exactly" is used ironically by native speakers 60% of the time while the Longman Learner's Corpus revealed it is used ironically by ESL students only 20% of the time.


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Casiopea

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milky said:
The British National Corpus revealed that the expression "not exactly" is used ironically by native speakers 60% of the time while the Longman Learner's Corpus revealed it is used ironically by ESL students only 20% of the time.


What's going on?
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native speakers use 'not exactly' 60% of the time
non-native speakers use 'not exactly' 20% of the time

Conclusion: non-native speakers are starting to use 'not exactly' in certain context, but not in all possible contexts. :wink:
 
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