BERND KORTMANN / SUSANNE WAGNER
A fresh look at Late Modern English dialect syntax
1. Introduction*
Although the study of non-standard varieties has received
considerable attention over the past decades (cf eg the volumes edited
by Milroy/Milroy 1993 or Trudgill/Chambers 1991), most of the
research conducted in the field focuses on present-day variation. From
the point of view of language change, dialects offer not only a unique
opportunity to look at language change in progress by studying
innovative features of the spoken language. They also open a window
to the past since traditional varieties often exhibit conservative
features which help us understand the historical paths of language
change. At the same time, however, the focus of dialectological work
to this day has been on phonological variation, supplemented by
*
The authors would like to dedicate this paper to Guenter Rohdenburg on the
occasion of his 65th birthday. Guenther has not only been one of the most perceptive
and productive experts on the English language and on English-German contrasts in
Germany. Over the last years, Guenther, young researchers under his supervision, and
colleagues inspired by his ideas have also made major contributions on functional
principles accounting for grammatical variation in Present-day English and the history
of English (eg the Complexity Principle as a member of the family of iconicity
principles; cf for example the collection of articles in Guenter Rohdenburg and Britta
Mondorf eds. 2003. Determinants of Grammatical Variation. Berlin: Mouton de
Gruyter). Guenter is also unique in having had a long-standing interest in dialect
syntax, especially of Low German, and being among the first taking the need for
comparative studies in Germanic dialect syntax seriously (witness, for example, his
comparison of Low German dialects with English dialects with regard to several
morphosyntactic phenomena in Bernd Kortmann (ed.) 2004. Dialectology Meets
Typology. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.) The authors are thus optimistic that the present
paper meets with Guenter’s interest in grammatical variation both in the history of
English and English dialects, and will be deemed a suitable birthday present.
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Bernd Kortmann / Susanne Wagner
traditional accounts of dialect lexicology. The study of dialect
morphosyntax, however, is a relatively recent field of research (cf eg
the contributions in the state-of-the-art volumes by Beal,
Corrigan/Moisl Forthcoming, Kortmann/Schneider 2004 or Kortmann
et al 2005). This neglect is especially noticeable for older periods
English. The reasons for it are complex and differ from period to
period. From Old English to Present-day English, authors offer
numerous excuses why dialects are not good candidates for
investigation:
OE: Syntactic variation between dialects has scarcely been studied and in
any event the material is relatively meagre. (Toon 1992: 451)
ME: The Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English (1986) provides an
extensive survey of dialectal differences in the fields of phonology,
morphology and lexis, but it has nothing on syntactic variants. In the
introduction it is stated that ‘it may well be that syntax will perforce remain
the Cinderella of Middle English dialectology’ (McIntosh et al 1986: 32).
(Fischer 1992: 208)
EModE: evidence of Early Modern English dialect syntax is almost nil.
(Görlach 1999b: 492)
LME: Knowledge of dialect variation in the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries was incidental and unsystematic [...] and comments were almost
invariably unfavourable. (Finegan 1998: 551)
PDE: Variation in syntax has been very little studied by dialectologists, for
two reasons. In the first place, syntax as a branch of linguistics has not been
given much attention until fairly recently. Secondly, most significant syntactic
variation requires larger samples of a language than it has been convenient
or even possible to collect by the usual methods. (Francis 1983: 41, our
emphasis)
When summarising these statements, a rather coherent picture
emerges: Most experts agree that one of the main reasons for the
neglect of dialects, in general, and dialect morphosyntax, in particular,
is the lack of suitable data. This is based on the fact that, first of all,
only written (ie generally Standard English) material is available for
earlier time periods. Secondly, researchers are faced with the problem
of authenticity of the available data. Dialect literature is not as realistic
as it claims to be and should be treated with caution. Thus, so-called
dialect realism hampers any attempt at reconstructing valid accounts
A fresh look at Late Modern English dialect syntax
3
of historical non-standard varieties and should result in critical
distance to the available material. Witness David Crystal’s statement
on the situation in the nineteenth century:
During the nineteenth century, nonstandard English significantly increased its
presence in national literature, moving from simple attempts at regional
representation to subtle manipulations of dialect forms for literary effect.
(Crystal 2004: 487)
A third reason for the neglect of dialect syntax in the nineteenth
century was the focus of linguistic research on sound change. This is
true of historical comparative linguistics in general and, towards the
end of the nineteenth century, in the dialectological studies inspired by
the Neogrammarian research programme.
A fourth reason for the neglect of dialects in linguistic research
until fairly recently is a very pragmatic one – there was no real interest
in the topic. Rather, linguists felt that dialects have nothing to offer to
researchers. They were “not usually viewed as a living medium of
expression […] rather, they were thought of as relics of past times,
quaint curiosities to be cherished and preserved.” (Crystal 2004: 356)
Moreover, the use of dialect in every-day speech came to be viewed as
increasingly negative. It was associated with lower-class and/or rural
background, a change that is connected with the standardisation of
written language after Middle English period (cf Finegan’s quotation
on LME above). However, despite this rather negative attitude
towards non-standard varieties at the time, some descriptions of
dialects, even including catalogues of features, do exist and will be
described in the next section.
2. Existing catalogues of Late Modern English
dialect features
What little we know about English dialects in the eighteenth and
nineteenth century is almost exclusively based on the publications of
4
Bernd Kortmann / Susanne Wagner
the English Dialect Society (EDS), which had been founded for two
basic purposes (cf eg Görlach 1999a: 31): First, its aim was to collect
samples of rural speech which could be used for historical
reconstruction, providing input for the comparative method, with the
focus on sound comparison. The second aim was supported by the
other major research interest of the time, namely lexicology. The
projects were to record items of the dialect lexicon before they
disappeared, ultimately serving as input for the English Dialect
Dictionary (EDD; Wright 1898-1905). It is not very surprising that
these purposes very much shaped the output – just compare the EDD’s
more than 5000 A4-sized pages with the 700 very small pages of the
English Dialect Grammar (Wright 1905). Moreover, approximately
75% of the publications used as sources for the EDD are descriptions
of Northern dialects, only 10% contain information about the
Southwest (cf Görlach 1999a: 30). This regional bias is another
general drawback of the publications of the EDS.
Highly indicative of the phonological and lexicological research
focus of the EDS is the fact that only a handful of their approximately
80 publications contain information on morphological or syntactic
issues. Ihalainen’s compilation of dialect markers in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth century (1994: 213–215) is largely
based on only 6 publications of the EDS (ie less than 10% of the total
number of publications). Ihalainen (1994) draws up a catalogue of
morphosyntactic and phonological features; the regional distribution is
given in Figure 1. 24 of these are features of morphosyntax falling
into 6 groups. For each of these groups, the regional distribution is
given in Figure 2. The complete feature list can be found in Appendix
1; the morphosyntactic features included in this list are the following:
dialect region
North
features
· second person singular verb (tha knows ‘you know’)
· I is ‘I am’
· universal -s, subject to the Northern Subject Rule
· at ‘that’
A fresh look at Late Modern English dialect syntax
Southwest
West Midlands
East Anglia
5
· universal -th (present tense)
· universal -s (non-3rd person singular present tense)
· plural am
· second person singular verb (thee dost know)
· periphrastic do
· uninflected do, have
· pronoun exchange
· ich ‘I’
· proclitic ’ch ‘I’
· otiose of
· hoo ‘she’
· pronoun exchange
· -na-negation
· second person singular verbs (hast seen it – have you seen it?)
· plural present indicative marker –en (they sayn – they say)
· plural am
· that for it
· uninflected 3rd singular present tense
· uninflected do, have
· otiose of
Table 1. Morphosyntactic features from Ihalainen (1994)
14
number of features
12
10
8
accent
morphosyntax
6
4
2
0
North
West
Midlands
Southwest East Anglia Southeast
Figure 1. Distribution of eighteenth-/nineteenth-century dialect features in Ihalainen
(1994)
6
Bernd Kortmann / Susanne Wagner
35
30
% of features
25
Northern
West Midlands
Southwest
East Anglia
20
15
10
5
relative
clauses
negation
use of
prepositions
auxiliaries
personal
pronouns
person
marking in
present
0
Figure 2. Distribution of morphosyntactic categories in Ihalainen (1994)
3. Selected features of LME dialect syntax –
past and present contexts
In this section, we will contrast ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ features.
The terminology used here requires some explanation. The working
hypothesis is that traditional features are conservative features,
whereas modern features are innovations in the respective dialects.
The following analyses will show whether or not such labels are
justified (thus the question marks in the section headings below). The
sources for the studies presented here are the Survey of English
Dialects (SED) as a window to the past (most speakers born in the last
quarter of 19th century) and the Freiburg English Dialect Corpus
(FRED) which is used to validate and/or contrast with the SED
A fresh look at Late Modern English dialect syntax
7
findings (speakers born between 1890 and 1920). The two sources are
contrasted in Table 2; details on the SED are published in Orton
(1962), a description of FRED can be found in Kortmann/Wagner
(2005), Anderwald/Wagner (Forthcoming) includes even more details.
covered area
method
SED
University of Leeds (Eugen
Dieth, Harold Orton)
311 localities all over England
questionnaire-based interview
quantity
1322 questions per location
time collected
speaker profile
1950–1961
NORMs1
compiled at
FRED
University of Freiburg (Bernd
Kortmann)
9 major dialect areas
authentic speech data (mostly from
oral history collections)
2.45 million words
300h of speech
370 texts
1968–1999
NORMs
Table 2. SED vs. FRED
In other words, the focus of this paper will be on the latest sub-period
of LME, that is roughly the last quarter of the nineteenth century until
WWI (approximately a fifty-year-span from 1870 until 1920). It is
important to note in this context that the principles of compilation of
the SED were (still) informed by the major research background of the
time: historical reconstruction of sounds and lexicography. Thus, 730
of the 1,322 questions investigate lexical differences and 387 are
concerned with phonological issues. Only 205 questions (ie 15.5%)
address morphological or syntactic phenomena. The majority of these
questions helps us explore high-frequency features such as agreement
and personal pronouns, with numerous questions relating to irregular
verb paradigms.
3.1. ‘Traditional’ (conservative) features (?)
Below, we will put in perspective three features on the basis of a)
what we know about their history and b) what we know about their
1
See Chambers/Trudgill (²1998: 29).
8
Bernd Kortmann / Susanne Wagner
distribution in twentieth-century data. So it is primarily continuities
and changes in dialect morphosyntax we will be interested in. All of
these features are a part of Ihalainen’s feature catalogue.
3.1.1. The Northern Subject Rule
The Northern Subject Rule is one of the well-known features of
Northern dialects’ morphosyntax. Very generally, it states that every
verb in the present tense can take an -s ending, unless it is directly
adjacent to a personal pronoun. Thus, both of the following are correct
in those varieties which employ the rule: people says but they think
and strongly believes. Pietsch (2005a; 2005b) shows in a detailed
study how the feature developed from Late Middle English times
onwards. One of the major results of his analyses is the surprising
stability of regional characteristics over time (cf Maps 1 and 2).
MANUAL PAGING
A fresh look at Late Modern English dialect syntax
0
5
100k
no
no
3
1-2
1-4
Northumberla4
3-5
5-10
6 or
11 or
2
5
1
1
9
2
3
Durha
Cumberla5
4
6
8
7
2
3
4
1
3
3
1
Westmorla
4
1
3
7
12
13
4
8
3
Cheshir
5
6
5
5
Shropshi
6
8
7
10
9
2
Herefordsh 4
7
Staffords
4
1 7
3
5
6
2
3
5
Worcester
2
6
7
12
1
13
6
14
1
15
Norfol
2
10
Warwicks4
5
7
9
Lincolnshi
1
3
2
3
10
11
8
Leicestersh
9
11
2
8
1
4
9
7
6
Nottingham
7
6
5
3
4
10
1
2
5
6
8
11
1
7
4
3
4
2
1
3
Derbyshi
3
4
1
34
2
1
2
33
32
3
2
1
31
1
2
28
27
30
1
25
24
26
29
20
Yorkshi
19
23
22
14
4
16
18
21
12
13
4
15
Lancashi
11
10
10
11
14
9
9
8
17
56
7
4
2
6
5
2
5
5
6
2
6
fieldwork
other
S.
1
9
3
North’s
4
1
Hunt’s
1
2
2
Cambridges
5
© L. Pietsch
Map 1. The NSR in Late Middle English (based on data in LALME I: 467, IV: 110–
111)
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Bernd Kortmann / Susanne Wagner
Just compare the southern boundaries: the outer limits of the
transitional zone in the SED data (Map 1) are practically identical
with the southern boundary in LME (cf Map 2). Thus we can see that
the NSR is by no means a morphosyntactic feature distinctive of the
dialect syntax of LME, but has a tradition reaching back at least 400
years.
Linguistic
Regular
Occasional
0
Map 2:
5
100k
© L. Pietsch
Plural verbal -s in the SED fieldworker notebooks (all NP subjects)
A fresh look at Late Modern English dialect syntax
11
From a global perspective, another fact is of interest: although rules
like the Northern Subject Rule, also known as Singular Non-Concord
in the sociolinguistic literature (for detailed background information,
cf Pietsch 2005a; 2005b), are very rare in varieties of English worldwide, variation in agreement is not. In fact, just the opposite is true: In
46 non-standard varieties of English investigated, non-standard
agreement was one of the features most frequently encountered (cf.
Kortmann/Szmrecsanyi 2004 and Table 3). The most frequent ones
can be encountered in more than half of the investigated varieties,
whereas rules like the Northern Subject Rule are very rare.
feature
no 3rd person sg.
present tense marking
was/were
generalization
existential there’s etc.
deletion of be
dummy subject in
existential clauses
present tense -s
extended to all
persons
deletion of auxiliary
have
Northern Subject
Rule
encountered
regularly in ...
varieties
encountered
occasionally in ...
varieties
encountered in ...% of
the investigated
varieties
23
4
58.7
23
5
60.9
21
20
5
5
56.5
54.3
15
5
43.5
6
11
37.0
10
2
26.1
2
6
17.4
Table 3. Frequency of agreement features in Englishes world-wide
3.1.2 Pronoun exchange
In his feature list, Ihalainen mentions pronoun exchange for the West
Midlands and the Southwest, but does not give examples. Putting it
simply, pronoun exchange is the use of a subject personal pronoun in
an object position or all other positions that would normally require
the use of an oblique (ie non-subject) form. The reverse option (ie the
use of an object form in a subject slot) is also possible, but seems to be
more restricted even in very traditional dialects. Examples from FRED
include they always called I ‘Willie’, see (FRED Som_009) and We
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Bernd Kortmann / Susanne Wagner
used to stook it off didn’t us? (FRED Som_027). The most common
explanation for this type of use found in the literature is that the
subject forms are used when the respective form is emphasized, while
the oblique forms are used in all other contexts (Elworthy 1965: 3538; Kruisinga 1905: 35-36; Wright 1905: 271).
Although pronoun exchange has had its place in the literature
for centuries, it is impossible to determine how frequent it was in its
heyday. Based on a study which examined the responses to some 40
questions in the SED (cf Wagner 2001, 2004), it used to be very
frequent. About 50% of all pronominal forms are “exchanged” there,
with significant differences between the individual case forms (see
Table 4).
cases with PE
total
% PE
I for me
63
262
24.0
her for she
411
675
60.9
us for we
59
212
27.8
them for they2
149
203
73.4
total
682
1,352
50.4
Table 4. Number of PE-cases in total of pronouns (SED published)
However, when comparing these figures with data from FRED, it
turns out that pronoun exchange is, with only about 1% of all
pronominal forms “exchanged”, almost non-existent in the latter. This
is especially noteworthy given the fact that the FRED informants are
only about one generation younger than the SED informants. This
contrast points to the basic problem faced by anyone studying
accounts on dialects from earlier periods: in historical descriptions,
non-standard features are typically discussed in terms of their
presence (or absence). Modern statements, however, focus on
frequencies (relative and absolute) and distributional patterns rather
than mere presence or absence. For example, it is highly unlikely that
the statement of a nineteenth-century author about the presence of
double negation in a certain region should be taken to mean that
2
Almost exclusively used in tags.
A fresh look at Late Modern English dialect syntax
13
double negation was used in 100% of all negated cases in that
particular dialect.
In the case of pronoun exchange, the nature of the SED
interviews, for instance, are hardly representative of actual language
use. Most of the questions aimed at one particular term, and the
fieldworker often used direct elicitation by asking “What do you call
this?”, sometimes accompanied by showing a picture of the item in
question. Thus, it is only natural for the informants to respond with
“we used to call it …, didn’t we” or “they used to call it …, didn’t
they”, where the emphasis is clearly on the sought-after term, adding
considerably to the number of us and them in subject position. In
addition, contexts with feminine pronouns in subject position are also
rather frequent (eg VI.14.14 “She wears the breeches” or III.1.11
“slips the calf”), increasing the figure for her in subject position as
well.
Based on these findings, it is impossible to say whether pronoun
exchange ever was more frequent than the data from FRED indicate.
In order to determine such frequencies, it would be necessary to
analyse stretches of actual speech from the time periods in question, a
task that is next to impossible as interview data from the eighteenth
and nineteenth century do not exist.
3.1.3. Relative clauses and relative pronouns/particles
Relative clause formation is of interest here as it represents both
‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ features in the sense described earlier.
Traditional (conservative) relative markers such as Northern at or
(South)western as (so all as he had to do were go round in a circle all
the time ... FRED Som_001) compete with modern (innovative) ones
such as what (See he was the man what brought in decasualization
during the war; BNC H5H). In her study, Tanja Herrmann (2003;
2005) compared traditional data (SED) with modern corpus material
(data from FRED and the British National Corpus).
Two major findings resulted from that study, namely that a)
traditional forms are on the retreat, both to and even within their
homelands, and that b) the retreat follows the predictions made by the
Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy. Herrmann could also show that
14
Bernd Kortmann / Susanne Wagner
those strategies which are supposedly not regionally restricted (‘zero’,
ie gapping in subject position, and that) do indeed show regional
preferences (cf. Table 5).
North
South
Northern Ireland:
Scotland:
Central North:
Central Midlands:
East Anglia:
Central Southwest:
zero
46.9%
23.6%
34%
17.7%
20.4%
28.9%
that
50.1%
46.2%
43.5%
40.3%
22%
26.5%
what
––
0.4%
2.4%
5.8%
15.9%
22.3%
as
0.5%
––
1.4%
2.4%
––
––
Table 5. Distribution of relative markers along the North-South axis in percentages
It is obvious that a corresponding table with such detailed statistics is
simply impossible for LME. Secondly we note certain regional
preferences: The zero option is typical of Northern Ireland; that is
clearly preferred in the Midlands and North of the British Isles,
whereas what, the newcomer among the relative particles in BrE
dialects, is evidently making the inroads from the South. Moreover,
these regional preferences are also continuities from the 18th and 19th
century, including the North-South contrast concerning the choice of
relative particles (cf Herrmann 2005).
The study of relative clause formation strategies poses another
problem: One of the most frequent non-standard strategy, namely
gapping (or: zero relatives) in subject position, is next to impossible to
retrieve automatically (but see Lehmann 2002). This may be one of
the reasons why studies on regional contrasts between more than one
or two regions such as that by Herrmann, although promising
interesting results, are rarely done.
3.2. ‘Modern’ – innovative – features (?)
This section will focus on those features that are not explicitly
mentioned by Ihalainen which were very likely present during the
time period under discussion, but which were not reported on for a
number of reasons. Among the most likely motives for not mentioning
a feature are stigmatisation (likely for e.g. multiple negation) and/or
unawareness of regional contrasts.
A fresh look at Late Modern English dialect syntax
15
3.2.1. Multiple negation
Multiple negation has been retreating naturally since Late Middle
English (cf eg Iyeiri 2001: 130) before it was finally ruled out by
prescriptivists. Nevertheless, it is one of the most frequently found
features of non-standard varieties world-wide and lives on in many
English dialects to the present day. It is among those features which
are generally considered ‘universal’ in the sense that it does not
exhibit regional contrasts or a clear-cut regional distribution.
Contrasting with this opinion, Anderwald (Forthcoming) shows
that there is a clear North-South contrast for the frequency of negative
concord: Based on data from the BNC and FRED, it turns out that
multiple negation is most frequently found in the South. It is least
frequent in Wales, Scotland, and the North of England, with
intermediate values for the Midlands. Although this was hinted at in
earlier publications (cf eg Cheshire et al 1989: 205206; 1993: 75-76),
quantitative evidence to strengthen the claim could generally not be
provided.
3.2.2 Pseudo-passives with stood/sat
It appears that the pseudo-passive construction with sat and stood
represents a relatively recent, nineteenth century Northern innovation,
an innovation that took place as a consequence of dialect contact
between speakers of the standard dialect and speakers of Northern
vernacular varieties of English (Klemola 2002: 55).
Pseudo-passives with stood and sat are well-known and
generally classified as colloquialism rather than regional dialect
feature. However, Klemola’s analysis (2002: 53–54) reveals a clear
Northern bias. He found frequencies of pseudo-passive stood/sat of
2.5 per 100,000 words in the SED recordings and ca 2 per 100,000
words in the BNC demographic sample.
In their more modern data, Cheshire et al found that the
distribution of the construction in their survey “points to a recent
diffusion […] from the north and west of England.” They therefore
concluded that the feature may now be “becoming a characteristic of a
general non-standard or semistandard variety of English” (1989: 200;
cf also 1993: 70-71). Why the feature spreads from the North and the
16
Bernd Kortmann / Susanne Wagner
Southwest, two discontinuous areas, is unclear and should be
investigated in the future.
The regional distribution of pseudo-passives with stood/sat in
FRED (see Table 6) is very much in line with Klemola’s findings,
with frequencies similar to those of the SED recordings. Based on the
rather high frequencies in the SED material, and even higher ones in
FRED, we assume that stood/sat pseudo-passive are another candidate
for a regionally distinctive dialect feature (North and Southwest) in
the LME period, despite the fact that they are not mentioned in
contemporary dialect descriptions.
# of words
sat
stood
per 100,000 words
Southwest
571,421
12
7
3.33
Southeast
642,613
0
1
0.16
Midlands
359,074
0
1
0.28
North
434,306
17
8
5.76
Celtic
673,639
3
1
0.59
Total
2,681,053
32
18
1.86
Table 6. Distribution of pseudo-passives with stood/sat in FRED
Klemola did not contrast past and non-past contexts in his study. The
FRED data show a higher frequency of non-past forms (e.g. now I’m
going to tell you, and this is true as ever I’m sat in this chair FRED
Som_010) in the South(west) than elsewhere (see Figure 3) – the
question of whether this is in any way indicative of a further spread of
the feature to non-past contexts awaits further analysis.
90
80
70
76,7
60
60
50
40
40
30
23,3
20
10
0
past
non-past
North and Midlands
South and Southw est
A fresh look at Late Modern English dialect syntax
17
Figure 3. Distribution of stood and sat according to context
4. Conclusion and outlook
Two problems have emerged with regard to what is known about
LME dialect syntax:
(i) Accounts of variation in this period mention features for
their presence or absence so that it is often impossible to determine to
what extent present-day features are innovative or conservative. In
other words, it is impossible to determine the nature and range of
continuity and changes.
(ii) Modern accounts, on the other hand, tend to focus on the
distribution of features in terms of frequencies of occurrence rather
than the absolutes ‘present’ or ‘absent’. In fact, these differences in
methodology make it impossible or at least very difficult to compare
feature catalogues from the eighteenth and nineteenth century with
descriptions of present-day variation focussing on quantitative
statements.
For obvious reasons, a feature’s frequency of occurrence could
not be studied in earlier periods. Thus it seems not only possible but
indeed highly likely that some of the features mentioned by experts
for earlier periods never were more frequent than they are in the SED
or FRED data (or even the BNC). With such background knowledge,
it is to be expected that modern studies are in fact based on this rather
skewed picture, which in turn may result in wrong expectations,
wrong focus or even the analysis of the wrong feature(s). Therefore,
some of the not-so-highly-stigmatised features are not mentioned in
either historical or modern accounts, pointing to the fact that those
features operated (and still operate) below the level of (even an
expert’s) consciousness.
As a consequence, what little is known about regionally
distinctive features cannot be quantified. Features that seem worth
investigating from a modern point of view (eg in the FRED data) are
often not mentioned at all in early studies so that regional preferences
18
Bernd Kortmann / Susanne Wagner
and developments can neither be traced nor tested. This ignorance is
particularly noteworthy when studying the North-South contrast,
which could recently be correlated with morphosyntactic features that
were not assumed to show regionally distinct patterns (eg Anderwald
on multiple negation). In addition to multiple negation, there seems to
be a bundle of features (eg relative clause formation strategies) that
can be associated with a basic North-South contrast. These two
regions are highly distinctive not only when looking at traditional
features, but possibly also (or particularly) when analysing ‘new’
features that were either too stigmatised to be studied in detail before
(eg multiple negation) or too unremarkable to warrant detailed
analyses. It is thus possible that those ‘universal’ features have always
shown regional contrasts in their distribution which experts have been
and indeed largely still are simply unaware of (cf
Kortmann/Szmrecsanyi 2004). It turns out, then, that our fresh look at
LME dialects has proved to be a rather devastating or at least sobering
one. All the problems we know about from present-day dialect syntax
are multiplied when wanting to study LME. And even what little we
seem to know needs to questioned and often does not help us answer
questions from a PDE perspective.
This situation can only be remedied by compiling corpora that
are representative of the regional differences of the time. First efforts
in this direction have been undertaken by the Helsinki school,
promoting the field of historical sociolinguistics (see eg RaumolinBrunberg 1996). Data collection for such corpora is very timeconsuming, involving searches through archives and private
collections in order to unearth written material that comes as close to
natural speech data as possible (partial reconstruction eg by studying
the settlement histories of regions with transplanted dialects). Pinning
down an author’s regional background is also not an easy task. It is to
be hoped that collaborative work will ultimately result in a database
that can be used to answer at least some of the questions posed in this
article.
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A fresh look at Late Modern English dialect syntax
21
Appendix 1. Dialect markers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century
(Ihalainen 1994: 213-215)
Northern features:
1.
Northern lack of rounding
2.
Northern oo-fronting
3.
Northern long a
4.
/ai/-monophthongisation
5.
yod-formation
6.
l-vocalisation/dropping
7.
linking v
8.
soom ‘some’
9.
hoose ‘house’
10.
y-laxing
11.
t’ for the (def. article realised as stop)
12.
sal, ’s ‘shall’
13.
second person singular verb (tha knows ‘you know’)
14.
I is ‘I am’
15.
universal -s, subject to the Northern Subject Rule
16.
at ‘that’
West Midlands
1.
West midland ngg
2.
rounding before nasals
3.
ai-rounding
4.
same/seem switch
5.
hoo ‘she’
6.
pronoun exchange
7.
-na-negation
8.
second person singular verbs (hast seen it – have you seen it?)
9.
plural present indicative marker –en (they sayn – they say)
10.
plural am
Southwestern features
1.
voicing of initial fricatives
2.
retention of ME ai
3.
r for gh
4.
universal -th (present tense)
5.
universal -s (non-third person singular present tense)
6.
plural am
7.
second person singular verb (thee dost know)
8.
periphrastic do
9.
uninflected do, have
22
10.
11.
12.
13.
pronoun exchange
ich ‘I’
proclitic ’ch ‘I’
otiose of
East Anglian features
1.
Norwich a
2.
that for it
3.
uninflected third singular present tense
4.
uninflected do, have
5.
otiose of
Bernd Kortmann / Susanne Wagner