Introduction to Dialect Syntax: core concepts
David Hall
Outline and questions to tackle
• What is a dialect? Are there linguistically meaningful differences between “dialects” and “languages”?
• What different kinds of variation and variability do we see?
• How do generative linguists and variationist sociolinguists differ in their approach
to the study of language and dialects?
• Principles and Parameters approaches have been quite successful in describing
dialectal variation.
• There is something more than cross-dialectal variation: there is inter-speaker and
intra-speaker variability which a blanket parametric approach struggles to capture.
• Given this, what are alternative generative approaches to dialectal and idiolectal
variability, which can capture idiolectal variability?
• From a methodological point of view: what are the pros and cons of different
types of linguistic data used in different traditions, and how should you go about
tackling complex variable data?
1
Language, Dialect, Idiolect: what’s the difference?
• What are often called “languages” are often more similar to each other than what are
referred to as dialects.
(1) Separate languages?
(2) Separate dialects, same language?
a. Serbian and Croatian
a. Mandarin and Cantonese
b. Hindi and Urdu
b. Yiddish and German
c. Swedish and Norwegian
c. Sicilian and Italian
• From a purely linguistic perspective, Hindi and Urdu are the same language (same
syntax, phonology, morphology, etc., but different script), with some lexical differences.
They are mutually intelligible.
• Mandarin and Cantonese, on the other hand, are not mutually intelligible: they
have different phonology, and to some extent syntax, aside from lexical differences.
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• Mutual intelligibility seems to be the best we can do, but it’s not good enough:
there is the problem of gradience in mutual intelligibility.
• It seems that “languages” and “dialects of a language”, as separate entities, are not
really definable linguistically. From a linguistic perspective, everything is a dialect.
• BUT the terms have sociopolitical reality. A sociopolitical definition seems more
fitting. Hindi and Urdu are considered to be separate languages because of complex
historical and sociological reasons.
• Famous quote, attributed to Max Weinreich, who attributed it to an auditor at one of
his lectures:
“A language is a dialect with an army and navy.”
Summary
• There is no linguistically meaningful difference between a ‘language’ and a ‘dialect’.
Everyone speaks a dialect, but some dialects have more social and political capital
associated with them than others.
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Differing conceptions of the object of study: what’s
the ‘ling’ in ‘linguistics’ ?
• Generative Linguistics (Chomsky), also to some extent Structuralist Linguistics (e.g.,
Saussure)
– The object of study is linguistic competence: the rule governed mental system that
generates well-formed linguistic expressions (what is the nature of the structure of
linguistic expressions, and what is the nature of the system that gives rise to them).
– This involves an abstraction away from the nuances of what actually comes out of
someone’s mouth at any given point: a variety of non-linguistic factors can give rise to
‘performance issues’ (memory, motor-control, environmental factors). Homogeneity
across speakers is assumed.
“Let us refer to this ‘notion of structure’ as an ‘internalized language’ (Ilanguage). The I-language, then, is some element of the mind of the person
who knows the language, acquired by the learner, and used by the speakerhearer... The statements of a grammar are statements of the theory of
mind about the I-language, hence statements about structures of the brain
formulated at a certain level of abstraction from mechanisms.” (Chomsky
1986 pp21-23)
• Sociolinguistics (Labov)
– The object of study is linguistic performance, the actual use of language in concrete
situations, and the (orderly) heterogeneity of language in use.
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– Further, the object of study is the sociolinguistic variable, and what constrains the
variability present in speech within and across communities (more on this later).
– This extends to language change: what/who drives it, when and why.
– All of these things are tied to the social meaning of different variables, and communicative competence: our implicit understanding of the socio-pragmaitc rules of
language use.
–
“The concept of idiolect might be employed here: we might isolate each
style as a separate idiolect, and attempt to describe that. However, the
over all [sic] result of this study indicates that idiolects are not the most
consistent, most explicable unit of linguistic behaviour in New York City.
On the contrary, the speech of many individuals appears as studded with
oscillations and contradictions, and it is only when it is placed against the
overall framework of social and stylistic variation of the speech community
that we can discern the regular structural pattern that governs this behavior.” Labov (1966, p11)
• Generative I-language approach appears at first glance to have nothing much to say
about variation/variability, as it abstracts away from local differences, and takes the
main object of study to be the cognitive system that allows us to generate and interpret
complex linguistic expressions.
• The sociolinguistic perspective, on the other hand, is focused pretty much solely on
variability.
• Is there a way to bring together sociolinguistic ideas about variation (the sociolinguistic variable) and generative approaches to the language faculty? Can the I-language
perspective be enriched by including the variability that sociolinguistics focuses on?
• Well, yes!
Summary
• From an I-language perspective, it makes sense to go one step further and say
that there are not even really dialects: we’re after a characterisation of an individual’s mental make-up. It’s probably the case that no two speakers have the
same grammar, but of course there does exist generally consistent behavioural
data (judgments) across a community in clear cases.
• From a sociolinguistic perspective, there are certain regularities that can only
be gleaned from studying the entire speech community, and interactions between
social and linguistic variables.
• We should be looking for ways to unite the two approaches: we want to be able
to abstract away from variability at a certain level, but explain it when it is rule
governed.
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Kinds of Variation and Variability
• We can think of variation at three levels:
– Variation between “languages” (cross-linguistic variation): is a phrasal category in
a language head-initial or head-final?
(3) a. I [VP went to Scotland].
(4) a. [VP V [PP P DP] ]
b. boku wa [VP sukottorando ni itta].
I
top
Scotland
to went
b. [VP [PP DP P] V ]
– Variation across dialects: does a dialect have negative concord, where another
doesn’t?
(5) a. I didn’t do anything.
b. I didn’t do nothing.
– Intra-speaker (idiolectal) variability: does a speaker occasionally realise word medial
intervocalic /t/ as [P], and sometimes as [t]?
(6) water
a. wO:t@
b. wO:P@
• Note that each of these types of differences could also appear at each other level:
negative concord can be a regular feature of a standardized language (e.g., Italian,
Hungarian), and it is possible that word-order in some phrases could be a dialectal
difference (e.g., She gave a book the man in some Northern English dialects).
Phonological
Morphological
Syntactic
Inter-language
Initial
aspiration of
stops
Direction of
affixation
Word order;
Agreement;
Negative
concord
Dialectal
l-vocalization;
t-glottalization;
rhoticity
Idiolectal
t-glottalization
Agreement;
Negative
concord; word
order?
Agreement;
Negative
concord
• What causes cross-dialectal variation and intra-speaker variability? A number of factors: sociological factors, geographical factors, discourse factors, processing factors,
prosodic factors, grammatical factors...
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• We should note that from a generative perspective, we should expect no difference
between the limits of variation between “languages” and between “dialects”, because
they are one and the same.
• There are, however, two different kinds of variation that we need to separate out, but
which could potentially be explained in the same way:
1. Variation within a community which largely shares the same judgments: e.g.,
group A always requires 3sg -s with 3sg subjects, group B does not (both groups
share a broadly similar grammar).
2. Variability in output within an individual: e.g., sometimes I say “we were...”,
sometimes I say “we was...”
Summary
• There is variation across ‘langauges’, dialects, and also within an individual speaker.
• For the most part, the types of variation that we see across languages, dialects,
and within idiolects is the same.
• This fits well with the idea that there really is no distinction between languages
and dialects. We can perhaps go further and say that only idiolects are real in a
linguistic sense: this is what the I-language approach says, but the sociolinguistic
approach doesn’t quite.
• We should probably distinguish between within-group variation and withinindividual variability.
• We’ll come back to the notion of sociolinguistic variable later, where we’ll see that
there are some kinds of variability which seem to go beyond the individual system.
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Covariation of phenomena and parameters
• One classical way of thinking about variation across languages and dialects comes from
the Principles and Parameters framework of generative linguistics.
• Fundamental idea:
– there is a set of universal principles governing the nature of the linguistic system,
and these principles hold across all human language users. Proposed principles:
structure dependence of rules, binding theory, move α, cyclicity; and later on in GG
history: Merge, Agree, Phases (cyclic spell-out).
– Alongside this, there are a set of parameter settings, whose values vary across
speakers. They can be thought of as a set of ‘switches’ or binary choices between
two options, and determine the differences in the surface grammar that we see.1
1
As we’ll see later, the ‘switch’ analogy is not the only way to think about parametric variation.
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– Comparative parametric syntax “accounts for observed clusterings of syntactic properties by showing that the several properties in question can all be traced back to a
single relatively more abstract parameter setting.” (Kayne 2000, p3).
• For example: there could be a set of ‘headedness’ parameters which determine whether
a phrase is head initial or head final. The assumption is that at some point in acquisition, the child gets to a point where the primary linguistic data points to a particular
setting of a parameter, and switches it to the appropriate setting.2
• We might expect certain parameters to interact with each other, so that certain patterns
would be expected to be common/rare/impossible (and this could explain Greenberg
universals/tendencies).
(7) Example parameter hierarchy (taken from Boeckx and Leivada 2013)
• A microparametric approach would go one step further and suggest that differences
between dialects are also accounted for in the same way, just with more subtle parameters.
2
There are a variety of ways to think about how these parameters get set: see, e.g., Yang (2002), the
Cambridge ReCoS project (e.g., Biberauer, Holmberg, Roberts, and Sheehan 2010, Bazalgette 2015),
Kayne (2000), among many others.
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• It is out of this kind of conception of linguistic variation that we get a more meaningful
use of the term ‘dialect’: you might see syntacticians using the term to refer to groups
of people who mostly share grammaticality judgements where there is some variability
within a language group. The ‘dialect’ is the grammar that results from a set of
parameter settings interacting.
• Richard Kayne:
“My own experience in observing the syntax of English speakers, both linguists and nonlinguists, makes me think that it is entirely likely that no two
speakers of English have exactly the same syntactic judgments . . . in fact, if it
is true that no two English speakers have the same syntactic grammar, then
the number of varieties of English/distinct grammars of English must be at
least as great as the number of native speakers of English . . . Extrapolating
to the world at large, one would reach the conclusion that the number of
syntactically distinct languages/dialects is at least as great as the number of
individuals presently alive.” (Kayne 2000:7-8)
• This idea goes back at least 100 years: “... we have, strictly speaking, to differentiate
as many languages as there are individuals.” (Hermann Paul 1890, Principles of the
History of Language)
4.1
A concrete example: parameters applied to dialects and
idiolects
• Henry (1995) — Inverted imperatives in Belfast English
(8) a. You go away!
b. Go you away!
c. Read you that book!
• For some (typically old) speakers, any verb can do this. Henry proposes that this is a
case of optional verb movement to C.
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(9)
CP
C[imp]
TP
T
vP
you
vP
v
VP
V
read
DP
that book
• For some (typically younger) speakers, only unaccusative verbs and passives can do
this: Henry proposes that there is no verb movement to C for these speakers: the
subject is just structurally base-generated in post-verbal (object) position, and never
moves out of VP.
(10) a. Go you away!
b. *Read you that book!
(11)
CP
C[imp]
TP
T
VP
VP
V
go
away
DP
you
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• Some additional evidence that this is the case comes from the position of adverbs: VP
adverbs never intervene between the verb and the subject
(12) a. Quickly run you home
b. *Run quickly you home
• A parameter could exist which determines whether the verb can move to C or not. For
younger speakers, the setting is [− move to C], for the older speakers it is [+ move to
C].
• This is a case of the slow disappearance of grammars where verb movement to C
is possible. Henry claims that this is because standard English does not allow this
generally, and the influence of Standard English on the younger generation has become
overwhelming. Thus the language change can also be explained.
• Note: to capture the intra-speaker variability, we still need something like an optional
feature/rule.
Summary
• The generative enterprise has tried to explain the vast variation that we see whilst
maintaining that there is also a core set of principles that underlie the faculty of
language.
• The universal characteristics are called Principles: they do not vary, and underlie
the language system of all humans.
• The variation that we see is due to different sets of parameters, which are set based
on the PLD that the child is exposed to.
• The idea of Parameters can be applied to explain cross-dialectal differences.
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The Sociolinguistic Variable
• Some linguistic differences are not differences in truth conditional meaning, but do
convey different social meanings.3
• Cheshire (2005), pp86-87: A sociolinguistic variable is “a structural unit with two or
more variants involved in co-variation with social variables.”
(13) I bought a bottle of water
a. ai bO:t @ b6tl @v wO:t@
"
b. ai bO:P @ b6PO»: @v wO:P@
3
The lack of difference in truth conditional meaning is less clear in the case of syntactic variables, but
we can see a similar effect nonetheless.
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(14) a. We were going to Sainsbury’s when ...
b. We was going ∅ Sainsbury’s when ...
• The (a) and (b) examples are equivalent in truth conditional meaning, but people will
assign different social meanings to them.
• The (b) variants are often proscribed, by teachers, politicians, social commentators,
and other authority figures – but what is the driving force behind negative attitudes?
Is there any sense in which one form is more degraded than the other?
• Chambers (2002) points out that this kind of attitude has been around since some of
the earliest recorded writings:
(15) Sirach, Old Testament moralist (16) Cicero, 55 bc
“When a sieve is shaken,
the rubbish is left behind;
so too the defects of a person appear in speech. As
the kiln tests the work of
the potter, so the test of
a person is conversation”
(Ecclesiasticus 27: 4-5)
“learn to avoid not only the
asperity of rustic pronunciation but the strangeness of
outlandish pronunciation”
(De Oratore III, 12)
• Possible variables which interact with use of a particular variant include age, class,
gender, ethnicity, relationship, relative standing in some hierarchy, language attitude
etc.
• Sociolinguistic variables can be sensitive to some social variables and not others: it
might be the case that t-glottalization covaries with class and age, but not ethnicity.
• Example from Labov (1966): percentage of ‘constricted /r/’ use across class groups
and across speech styles.
(17)
Class
Working
Middle
Upper
A
2.5
4.0
12.5
Style
B
C
D
D0
10.5 14.5 23.5 49.5
12.5 21.0 35.0 55.0
25.0 29.0 55.5 70.0
Styles: casual speech (A), careful speech (B), reading style (C), pronunciation of isolated words (D), pronunciation of minimal pairs distinguished only by the variable in
question (D0 ).
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• (r) is the variable, and has two variants, /r/ and ∅. X is the frequency with which any
variant occurs, and X is correlated with social variables and stylistic levels.
(18) a. (r) = X /r/
b. X = f(S,C), where S = stylistic level, C = class status.
• The data in the table suggests a linear model:
(19) f(S,C) = aS + bC + c
• “Some linguistic variables are functions of other linguistic variables, and are not directly
influenced by any factors outside of the linguistic system” (p16)
• Certain speakers might not ever even produce /r/ in speech, but the claim is that they
nonetheless participate in the sociolinguistic structure of the community, and that the
variable (r) is a part of that system.
• The important take-home message: there are multiple forms which have the same (compositional) meaning, but which have different social meaning. Choice of a particular
variant appears chaotic when focusing only on the individual, but can be understood
as structured and rule-governed when viewed as embedded in the interactions of the
wider speech community. Choice of a particular variant is a function of certain social
(and linguistic) variables.
Summary
• The idea of variable output throws a spanner in the works: differences are not just
across individuals, but also within individuals.
• This also presents a problem for the generative ‘rule-based’ approach to linguistic
output. Whether one variant or another is used does not depend only on linguistic
factors.
• To capture this, it seems we need to be able to talk about “multiple grammars”
producing different outputs, but is that really what we want? Is there some other
way to think about variability in the output?
6
A different approach to parameters — it’s all in
the lexicon.
• The parametric system that we discussed earlier would have to say that a speaker who
exhibits variable output of a particular syntactic variable has two different parameter
settings, and that the speaker can switch between them. But this goes against most
ideas about how parameters are set from an acquisition perspective.
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• A slightly different implementation of the idea of parameters became popular with the
advent of the Minimalist programme. This alternative view of variation in minimalism
has been influenced by a proposal by Hagit Borer (originally in 1984), which later
became the Borer-Chomsky conjecture (Baker 2008):
(20) The Borer-Chomsky Conjecture
All parameters of variation are attributable to differences in the features of particular items (e.g., the functional heads) in the lexicon.
• Therefore, the idea of parameter switches at a global level has been replaced by the
idea of different feature specifications on heads at a very local level.
• Take the Belfast English example earlier. We might imagine that Imperative C has a
lexical specification for a strong feature which will enter into an Agree relation with,
and attract, the verb.
• Adger and Smith (2005) propose that we can do this by making use of interpretable
vs uninterpretable features in the syntax. If the difference in the two lexical items lies
only in the uninterpretable features, then we have the same compositional meaning
(the syn-sem interface ignores these features), but we leave open the possibility that
they can carry different social meanings (and also that phonological outputs could be
different).
• We can imagine that for the older generation of speakers, there are two possible different
lexical items for Imperative C: one with a strong feature which attracts the verb, and
the other without this feature (* indicates a strong feature, which attracts the goal: see
Adger 2003, Chomsky 1995). The choice of particular lexical item is then influenced
by a variety of language external factors.
(21) Feature specifications for the two imperative C heads:
a. inversion-C: [i imp, u*V]
b. non-inversion-C: [i imp, uV]
• Importantly, though, the speaker only has one grammar, just some extra lexical
items.
Summary
• An influential way to think about variation is the Borer-Chomsky Conjecture.
• Different features on functional items means syntax appears to behave differently
across individuals.
• We can model sociolinguistic variability using different uninterpretable feature
specifications.
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Other generative approaches to idiolectal variability
• There are a variety of other ways of thinking about variability from an generative
perspective. I give a short summary of two approaches here.
7.1
Kroch 1994: competing grammars
• Variability in some grammatical feature invariably leads to a stable grammar where
one of the options wins out in the end (examples Ancient Greek SOV to SVO, Late
Middle English V2 to normal SVO).
• There is no stable variability: variability is the reflex of competing grammars, where
one eventually wins out.
• Evidence for the notion of competition between grammars can be seen in the Constant
Rate Effect, whereby grammatical changes, regardless of the differing frequencies of
variants of a variable, follow the same rate of change of frequency (the slope of the
regression model is the same).
• Competing grammars are only ever posited by the learner when there is an appropriate
level of evidence in the PLD.
• Morphological variants which are not functionally distinguished are disallowed (competition and blocking): “so we should not expect to find variation between semantically
non-distinct syntactic heads”.
• The same can be said of functional heads in the syntax.
• This is broadly similar to the Borerian approach that Adger and Smith take, with
a slightly different execution: it is mainly focused on the idea of unstable variability
across a community.
7.2
Henry 2005: Back to phrase structure rules
• There are a bunch of different factors which affect whether agreement on the verb
in existential-there sentences in English is sg or pl, and these factors vary across
individuals. This gives rise to quite a lot of variation across speakers.
(22)
Sentence
There are three books on the table
There’s three books on the table
There is three books on the table
There was three books on the table
Group 1
Group 2
Group 3
X
X
X
Group 4
X
X
X
*
*
X
*
*
X
*
X
X
*
• A strict minimalist conception of agreement between verb and subject (and associate),
modelled as Agree/feature valuation cannot straightforwardly capture the massive variation here.
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• What we need is some set of conditions on agreement which is differently specified
for each speaker, and a blanket parameter based approach cannot capture the data
(note also that this is structure specific, the same factors do not affect non-expletive
subjects).
• Henry’s suggestion is that variability in the input leads the individual to posit a set of
rules that captures the data, and these rules are construction specific in some cases.
The grammar, it seems, is a set of rules: Henry argues that our research project
should be to work out the limits on the type of rule that language can make use of
(e.g., agreement is never dependent on the number of words away from the verb the
associate is).
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Methodological considerations
8.1
Data types: mining corpora vs judgment tasks
• Pros and cons of different types of data.
Mining Corpora
Possible performance errors
Possible annotation/coding errors
Possibly skewed in non-linguistic ways
Frequency data available
Unpluggable gaps
Mostly divorced from observational bias
Non-standardized
Introspection/Judgment tasks
Can control for at least some performance errors
Little to no need for annotation/coding of data
Can control for skewing
No frequency data available
Gaps can be plugged
Possible subjective skewing
Can be affected by standardization
• An important point on frequency data: when is a zero really a zero?
– You might find that you have a cool corpus full of interesting spontaneous speech.
You are looking at one variable in particular (say Preposition-drop in Multicultural
London English), and upon a sophisticated statistical analysis, you discover that
P-drop never occurs when the verb go is in an embedded clause of depth 2 (John
said that Mary thinks that she’s going ∅ church on Sunday).
– Does this mean that you have a categorical absence of P-drop in such an environment? Is this a real zero or just an artefact of the data?
– This is where judgment tasks really pull their weight! You can test this.
– The moral is: never assume that zero means *. Unfortunately, there is no negative
data in corpora, but you can use the positive data to form hypotheses which are
testable with judgment tasks.
8.2
What to do when confronted with variability
• Take all of this into account when confronted with interesting dialect data
– What does the corpus data (if any) suggest?
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– What might your (internal) linguistic variables be? What might your (external)
sociological variables be?
– Is the appearance of a certain variant conditioned by hard (categorical) or soft (probablilistic) constraints?
– Is it a mixture of the two?
– Is variability in one domain isolated, or does it correlate with variability in another
domain?
– Do frequency data alone suggest any hypotheses that you can test with judgment
tasks?
Overview and Conclusion
• The relevant target of analysis of language variation is the idiolect: every person
has their own linguistic system, but this system is likely to be similar to those
around them.
• There is not only variation between speakers/groups of speakers: there is also
intra-speaker variability.
• This intra-speaker variability is traditionally the topic of sociolinguistic analysis,
because use of a particular variant often covaries with certain sociological variables.
• However, we as generative linguists also have to say something about how to model
this variability.
• There are a number of ways to do this: multiple grammars, optional rules, stochastic weighting of rules, differing lexical feature specifications.
• Great guiding principle from Barbiers (2005, p235):
“Generative linguistics and sociolinguistics are complementary in that
it is the task of sociolinguistics to describe and explain the patterns of
variation that occur within a linguistic community, given the theoretical
limits of this variation uncovered by generative linguistics.”
• It is quite possible to gain insight into the underlying nature of the human linguistic
system through studies of variation.
References
Adger, David (2003). Core Syntax: A Minimalist Approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Adger, David and Jennifer Smith (2005). Variation and the minimalist program. In
Syntax and Variation: Reconciling the Biological and the Social. John Benjamins.
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Baker, Mark (2008). The macroparameter in a microparametric world. In Theresa
Biberauer (ed.), The Limits of Syntactic Variation, 351–373. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins.
Barbiers, Sjef (2005). Word order variation in three-verb clusters and the division of
labour between generative linguistics and sociolinguistics. In Leonie Cornips and
Karen Corrigan (eds.), Syntax and Variation: Reconciling the Biological and the
Social. John Benjamins.
Bazalgette, Timothy (2015). Algorithmic acquisition of focus parameters. Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge University.
Biberauer, Theresa, Anders Holmberg, Ian Roberts, and Michelle Sheehan (eds.)
(2010). Parametric Variation: Null Subjects in Minimalist Theory. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Boeckx, Cedric and Evelina Leivada (2013). Entangled parametric hierarchies: Problems for an overspecified universal grammar. PLoS ONE 8(9).
Chambers, J. K. (2002). Studying language variation: An informal epistemology. In
J. K. Chambers, Peter Trudgill, and Natalie Schilling-Estes (eds.), The Handbook
of Language Variation and Change. Blackwell.
Cheshire, Jenny (2005). Syntactic variation and spoken language. In Leonie Cornips
and Karen Corrigan (eds.), Syntax and Variation: Reconciling the Biological and
the Social. John Benjamins.
Chomsky, Noam (1995). The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Henry, Alison (1995). Belfast English and Standard English: Dialect Variation and
Parameter Setting. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Henry, Alison (2005). Idiolectal variation and syntactic theory. In Leonie Cornips
and Karen Corrigan (eds.), Syntax and Variation: Reconciling the Biological and
the Social. John Benjamins.
Kayne, Richard (2000). Parameters and Universals. Oxford University Press.
Kroch, Anthony (1994). Morphosyntactic variation. In Katharine Beals (ed.), Papers
from the 30th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society: Parasession
on Variation and Linguistic Theory.
Labov, William (1966). The linguistic variable as a structural unit. Washington
Linguistics Review 3:4–22.
Yang, Charles (2002). Knowledge and Learning in Natural Language. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
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