Writing a research paper with the above title = something I have done. Yep. It was for my Advanced English Grammar course...and it was fun. I KNOW. The gist of the paper was that I took a look at what the literature had to say about somebody and someone, and whether there was any consensus on the differences (or lack thereof) between the two. All the big reference grammars (Swan, Quirk, etc.) said there was basically no usage distinction between somebody and someone, and language blogs like Grammar Girl and Language Log tended to agree. "Just use whichever one sounds best to you," they shrugged.
However, one of the basic principles espoused by this course's huge blue grammar book (Celce-Murcia & Larsen-Freeman) is that if a language has two forms with the same meaning, there must be a difference in use. Along those lines, I had one rogue source (Bolinger) tell me that somebody and someone are NOT interchangeable, but are used to signify distance/negativity (somebody) or nearness/intimacy/positivity (someone). Consider the sentence, "This present is for someone very dear to me." Could you really substitute somebody for someone there? Bolinger thinks not. I think Gotye (and Adele, as my British professor pointed out) would concur.
So I took a look at the corpus, aka the BYU's own COCA. Corpus research is a way of answering questions about language by looking at what we actually produce - in spoken and written English, in newspapers, morning talk shows, novels, etc. anything. For this small-scale research, I looked at ten occurrences of somebody and ten of someone in the corpus at large, and then analyzed the context (given by the corpus) to see if the word was being used to signify distance/negativity or nearness/intimacy/positivity.
Surprisingly - and I use that word because I think most of us, upon casual reflection, would say that we do use somebody and someone absolutely interchangeably - my investigation of the corpus supported the hypothesis of the rogue grammarian (Bolinger). Ten out of ten of the instances of somebody did in fact indicate distance or negativity. On the someone side, the support was somewhat weaker, with seven out of ten indicating intimacy/positivity.
So there you have it. Whether you were aware of it or not, it is possible - meaning there is evidence in the literature and in my own very small-scale research - that you are using somebody when you are talking about a person in a vague, distant, hypothetical, or negative way; and someone when you are talking about a person who is near to or intimate with you.
What do you think? I know that in the case of song lyrics prosody has as much role as anything else, but what kind of a weird song would "Someone That I Used to Know" be? Or "Somebody Like You"?
However, one of the basic principles espoused by this course's huge blue grammar book (Celce-Murcia & Larsen-Freeman) is that if a language has two forms with the same meaning, there must be a difference in use. Along those lines, I had one rogue source (Bolinger) tell me that somebody and someone are NOT interchangeable, but are used to signify distance/negativity (somebody) or nearness/intimacy/positivity (someone). Consider the sentence, "This present is for someone very dear to me." Could you really substitute somebody for someone there? Bolinger thinks not. I think Gotye (and Adele, as my British professor pointed out) would concur.
So I took a look at the corpus, aka the BYU's own COCA. Corpus research is a way of answering questions about language by looking at what we actually produce - in spoken and written English, in newspapers, morning talk shows, novels, etc. anything. For this small-scale research, I looked at ten occurrences of somebody and ten of someone in the corpus at large, and then analyzed the context (given by the corpus) to see if the word was being used to signify distance/negativity or nearness/intimacy/positivity.
Surprisingly - and I use that word because I think most of us, upon casual reflection, would say that we do use somebody and someone absolutely interchangeably - my investigation of the corpus supported the hypothesis of the rogue grammarian (Bolinger). Ten out of ten of the instances of somebody did in fact indicate distance or negativity. On the someone side, the support was somewhat weaker, with seven out of ten indicating intimacy/positivity.
So there you have it. Whether you were aware of it or not, it is possible - meaning there is evidence in the literature and in my own very small-scale research - that you are using somebody when you are talking about a person in a vague, distant, hypothetical, or negative way; and someone when you are talking about a person who is near to or intimate with you.
What do you think? I know that in the case of song lyrics prosody has as much role as anything else, but what kind of a weird song would "Someone That I Used to Know" be? Or "Somebody Like You"?