Grammatical Variation in British English Dialects

by Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt

• ISBN13: 9781107003453
• ISBN10: 1107003458
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-11-30
• Publisher: Cambridge Univ Pr

Summary

Variation within the English language is a vast research area, of which dialectology, the study of geographic variation, is a significant part. This book explores grammatical differences between British English dialects, drawing on authentic speech data collected in over thirty counties. In doing so it presents a new approach known as 'corpus-based dialectometry', which focuses on the joint quantitative measurement of dozens of grammatical features to gauge regional differences. These features include, for example, multiple negation (e.g. don't you make no damn mistake), non-standard verbals (e.g. so I says, What have you to do?), or non-standard weak past tense and past participle forms (e.g. they knowed all about these things). Utilizing state-of-the-art dialectometrical analysis and visualization techniques, the book is original both in terms of its fundamental research question ('What are the large-scale patterns of grammatical variability in British English dialects?') as well as in terms of its methodology.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Data and methods

The feature catalogue

Surveying the forest

Is morphosyntactic variability gradient? Exploring dialect continua

Classification: the dialect area scenario

Back to the features

Summary and discussion

Outlook and concluding remarks

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.