Download Comparative English Dialect Grammar: A Typological Approach

Comparative English Dialect Grammar: A Typological Approach*
Bernd Kortmann
University of Freiburg
This paper will give an outline of how dialectology and language typology can
fruitfully complement and open new vistas for each other. On the one hand, it is
a fascinating additional perspective for anyone interested in the study of dialect
grammar to determine the cross-dialectal variation for individual phenomena
and, in a second step, judge the observable patterns of variation against
generalizations, hierarchies and explanations which have grown out of the study
of cross-linguistic variation. On the other hand, dialectology has very interesting
things to offer to language typology. Most importantly perhaps, it can serve as a
corrective for typology, which often does not take sufficient care of the striking
differences between the grammars of standard (written) and spoken varieties of
languages, thus running the risk of comparing apples and oranges, as it were. The
paper will demonstrate how this research programme has been implemented in
the Freiburg project on comparative English dialect grammar, present a number
of interesting results, and outline several avenues for future research in an
English and European context.
1. Introduction
During the last two decades, but especially over the last few years, the study of the grammar of
English dialects has been very much on the rise after more than a century of neglect in English
dialectology and dialectology, in general.
In the second half of the 20th century a major part of the problem was the absence of a
sufficient amount of reliable data. The Survey of English Dialects, for example, compiled in the
1950s and serving as the most important data source for English dialectologists and dialect
geographers ever since, was simply not geared to the systematic collection of data on grammar.
Only a fraction of the more than 1300 questions in the SED questionnaire was explicitly
designed to collect morphological and syntactic information.
Even today, when we look at current Anglo-American dialect research, there is no
denying that the study of dialect syntax still constitutes no more than a sideline. What still
dominates dialectological research are phonological studies, these days especially in connection
with urban varieties, and such issues as dialect levelling, dialect and identity, or the folk
perception of dialects. This is not to deny, of course, that there exist quite a number of
publications on the grammar of English dialects (cf. for example Trudgill/Chambers 1991 or
Milroy/Milroy 1993). However, for the most part, the relevant studies concentrate on just one
particular phenomenon in one particular dialect or dialect area, are based on a very small
database and purely descriptive. Apart from that, the small size of the available databases often
makes it very difficult to formulate valid descriptive generalizations. Virtually non-existent in
English dialectology are systematic comparative studies of individual grammatical subsystems
across a selection of dialects (like comparative studies of the tense and aspect systems,
pronominal systems, relativization or complementation patterns, etc.).1
But there have also been very positive developments over the last two decades. Most
importantly, dialect grammar has started to matter in linguistic theorizing, beginning with the
attention it has attracted from a generative angle from the 1980s onwards (cf., for example,
Black/Motapanyane 1996 or various contributions to Barbiers/Cornips/van der Kleij 2002). With
the advent of the Principles & Parameters approach, not only cross-linguistic variation
(macroparametric syntax) started to matter in generative syntactic theory, but also languageinternal variation (microparametric syntax). Indeed, it was within generative theory that the
richness of dialect data was for the first time acknowledged and explored on a broader and
systematic scale in modern theories and models of syntax. This generativist interest in
morphosyntactic variation is still strong, especially in Dutch and Italian linguistics (cf. section
6.3 below), and has even found its way into generative theories based on Optimality Theory (cf.,
for example, the Stochastic OT account of morphosyntactic variation in English by Bresnan/Deo
2001).
The focus of this paper, however, will be on an even more recent approach to the study of
English dialect grammar, namely the typological approach adopted by my research group at the
University of Freiburg. I will present an outline of the major goals of this research project
(section 2), its methodology (section 3), some first results (sections 4 and 5), and major issues to
be tackled in future research on the morphosyntax of English dialects (sections 6.1 and 6.2) and
dialects in other European languages (section 6.3). Ultimately, this paper is meant to illustrate
the enormous research potential of English dialect grammar, in general, and the typological
approach to dialect grammar, in particular. There is a lot that we can learn from the grammar of
non-standard varieties (in English and other languages) for the study of language change and,
central to this paper, large-scale language comparison.
2. Comparative dialect grammar from a typological perspective: The Freiburg project
The Freiburg project started in the late 1990s and has received major funding from the Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinschaft since spring 2000 (until spring 2005).2 Its basic approach to the study
of dialect grammar is informed by the theoretical and methodological framework of functional
(or: Greenbergian) typology, which is primarily concerned with the patterns and limits of
morphological and syntactic variation across the languages of the world. The basic idea of the
Freiburg project is to adopt functional typology as an additional (!) reference frame for
dialectological research that fruitfully complements existing approaches. Among other things,
this means that we judge the cross-dialectal variation observable in individual domains of
grammar (e.g. negation, relative clauses, pronominal systems) against the cross-linguistic
variation described in typological studies. Both dialect syntacticians and typologists are bound to
profit from this kind of approach. On the one hand, dialectologists can draw upon a large body of
typological insights in, hypotheses on, and explanations for language variation. Dialect data can
thus be looked at in a fresh light and new questions be asked. On the other hand, typologists will
get a broader and, most likely, more adequate picture of what a given language is like if they no
longer ignore dialectal variation. In fact, non-standard dialects (as varieties which are almost
exclusively spoken) are bound to be a crucial corrective for typological research, which is
typically (especially for languages with a literary tradition) concerned with the written standard
varieties of languages. Standard British English, for example, is anything but representative of
the vast majority of English dialects if we think, for instance, of the absence of multiple negation
or the strict division of labour between the Present Perfect and the Simple Past.
3. The Freiburg Corpus of English Dialects (FRED)
On the way towards the ultimate goal of the Freiburg project it was first of all necessary to
compile a database which allows us to conduct serious qualitative and quantitative
morphosyntactic research across English dialects. The result is the computerized Freiburg
Corpus of English Dialects (FRED), which has been compiled over a period of roughly five
years and will be completed in the summer of 2003 (including the digitization of some 120 hours
of audio material). FRED currently consists of 2.5 million words (we are aiming for
approximately 3 million words), with representative subsamples for all English dialect areas
including data from Scotland and Wales. The data in FRED are orthographically transcribed
interviews collected for the most part during the 1970s and 1980s in the course of oral history
projects all over the British Isles. The majority of the informants are born between 1890 and
1920, i.e. are roughly a generation younger than the generation of SED informants.3
The nature of the data in FRED influenced the choice of the phenomena which have been
investigated in, so far, four Ph.D. theses and about a dozen Masters theses. In all these studies
the focus has been on high-frequency morphosyntactic phenomena, like negation, subject-verb
agreement, pronominal systems, and relativization strategies. Moreover, the machine-readability
of FRED, which allows analyses via automatic text retrieval programmes like TACT or
WordSmith, has also influenced the methodology, in that for the first time it is possible to
conduct not only qualitative, but also quantitative studies applying established corpus-linguistic
techniques. In the two following sections I will briefly present a small cross-section of
interesting results from the four Ph.D. theses.4 The results I will present in in sections 4 and 5
concern (a) surprising areal distributions of individual grammatical phenomena, (b)
morphosyntactic phenomena and patterns of variation which have not been observed for English
so far, sometimes not even for other European languages, and (c) areas of English dialect
grammar in which the non-standard varieties conform to cross-linguistic tendencies where
Standard English does not.
4. Areal distribution
It is by now well-known that not only phonological and lexical features of dialects may show a
clear regional distribution. This also holds true for morphosyntactic features, even though the
areas to which morphological and, particularly, syntactic properties may be restricted are
typically larger (and harder to pin down, in the first place) than those for regionally restricted
phonological and lexical features. Just take as used as a relative particle (one chap as lived next
door to us…) characteristic of the Midlands, especially the Central Midlands, and the Central
North, or unstressed do used as a simple tense-carrier (i.e. means of analytic tense marking) in
affirmative sentences in the Southwest (We do breed our own cows, This man what do own
this,...).5 However, in-depth comparative investigations across different dialects in the same area
as well as across different dialect areas may yield quite surprising results concerning the areal
distribution of individual grammatical phenomena. Three such surprises will be discussed below.
The first of these Susanne Wagner (in Kortmann/Herrmann/Pietsch/Wagner to appear
2004) discovered in the Southwest of England, which boasts several grammatical features
distinctive of or even, at least within the British Isles, restricted to this region (cf. Kortmann
2002). One of these features is a special (and typologically very rare) semantic system of
(pronominal) gender marking. What we encounter in Somerset, in particular, is pronominal
gender that is primarily sensitive to the mass/count distinction and only secondarily to the
animate/inanimate and human/nonhuman distinction. It is only used for mass nouns. Count
nouns take either he or she: she is used if the count noun refers to a female human, and he is used
for count nouns either referring to male humans or to nonhuman entities. Thus we get a contrast
as in (1a) and (1b):
(1)
a.
Pass the bread - it's over there. (bread = mass noun)
b.
Pass the loaf - he's over there. (loaf = count noun)
From an areal point of view, the following is interesting. In the literature, the point is repeatedly
made (a) that in the Southwest this is more typical of Somerset than of Cornwall, and (b) that, for
various historical reasons, Cornwall, especially West Cornwall, should generally not be
considered part of the Southwestern dialect area. However, both the relevant SED and FRED
material tell us quite a different story, not only with regard to the phenomenon of "gendered
pronouns" (alternatively labelled "gender diffusion") in (1), but for other morphosyntacic
phenomena, too. Typical dialectal features of the Southwest are quite (partly even most)
pronounced in West Cornwall and, at least in a few cases (such as gendered pronouns),
considerably less pronounced in Somerset.
The so-called Northern Subject Rule (NSR) is another interesting morphosyntactic
feature from an areal perspective. As the label suggests it is a feature that we find in the Northern
dialects of England, but also in Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. This rule
is all about subject-verb agreement, and can roughly be formulated as follows: every verb in the
present tense can take an s-ending unless its subject is an immediately adjacent simple pronoun.
(Third person singular verbs always take the s-ending, as in Standard English). In other words,
the NSR involves a type-of-subject constraint (pronoun vs. common/proper noun) and a position
constraint (+/- immediate adjacency of pronominal subject to verb). Thus, in NSR-varieties we
get the following examples:
(2)
a.
I sing. vs. *I sings.
b.
Birds sings.
c.
I sing and dances.
What is surprising about the regional distribution of the NSR is the following, as Lukas Pietsch
found (in Kortmann/Herrmann/Pietsch/Wagner to appear 2004). On the basis of the Northern
Ireland Transcribed Corpus of Speech (recorded in the mid-1970s, comprising some 230,000
words),6 Pietsch identified one central northwest-to-southeast belt in which the NSR usage is
most pronounced. Surprising about this is that this core-NSR area is not identical with the core
Ulster Scots areas, contrary to expectations based on the widely entertained view that the NSR is
historically most closely linked to Scots (cf. Montgomery 1994). Rather, its regional distribution
supports independently formulated views that the NSR in Ulster has its historical roots both in
varieties spoken by Scottish and English settlers.7
What was surprising about the regional distribution of gendered pronouns and the NSR
was that their usage turned out to be most pronounced in other areas than predicted. The next
(and last) surprise is of a completely different sort: a clear pattern of regional distribution
emerges where no one would ever have thought of one. The phenomenon at issue is multiple
negation (or: negative concord), as in I've never been to market to buy no heifers. If there is one
safe candidate for a supra-regional feature of non-standard syntax that probably even a nonlinguist would spontaneously point to, it surely is multiple negation. Indeed, Chambers (to
appear 2004) counts it among what he calls vernacular universals, i.e. a universal among the
non-standard varieties (of English and other languages) across the world (cf. also section 6.2).
The surprising thing for England, Scotland and Wales is this: in analyzing the FRED data,
Lieselotte Anderwald (in yet unpublished work) found confirmed what started out as a
hypothesis based upon her analysis of the spoken subsample of the British National Corpus
(Anderwald 2002a: 109-114), namely a clear south-north cline, with rough proportions of
multiple negation usage of 40-45% in the South of England, 30% in the Midlands, and around
10% in the North of England, Scotland and Wales. It is too early yet even to engage in "educated
speculations" what may be the reason for this, so I leave it at presenting this previously
undocumented surprise, which could be discovered only due to the comparative approach taken
in the Freiburg project and the dialect corpus created for this purpose.
5. Adopting a typological point of view
When putting cross-dialectal variation in perspective against cross-linguistic variation as
documented in typological studies, it is worth pointing out, first of all, that several of the
grammatical features discussed or mentioned in the previous sections are typologically very rare
and have partly been described for the first time in dialectological studies: this applies, in
particular, to the NSR and gendered pronouns. Apart from the dialects of the English Southwest
and Newfoundland, a semantic gender system sensitive to the mass/count distinction, for
example, has only been observed for other Germanic dialects so far (cf. Siemund 2002: 28-30).
This list of previously rarely or undocumented morphosyntactic features in non-standard dialects
(even if one does not look beyond the languages of Europe) could easily be prolonged.
The perspective taken in the present section will be a different one, however. The idea is
to give some examples illustrating how the theoretical and methodological "toolkit" of language
typology can fruitfully be brought to bear in describing, accounting for, or at least shedding light
on properties of the grammars of dialects. Among other things we will see that, in a number of
cases, the non-standard varieties are typologically "more well-behaved" than Standard English,
in that they follow a majority pattern in the world's languages and/or conform to cross-linguistic
tendencies where Standard English does not. The grammatical domains I will confine myself to
are relative clauses and negation.
One of the most famous hierarchies in functional typology is Keenan and Comrie's Noun
Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (short: AH), which they formulated for relative clauses:
(3)
Accessibility Hierarchy
subject > direct object > indirect object > oblique > genitive > object of comparison
According to the AH, if a language can relativize any NP position further down on the hierarchy,
it can also relativize all positions higher up, i.e. to the left of it. This constraint applies to
whatever relativization strategy a language employs. For the relativization strategy known as
zero-relativization (or: gapping) there is thus a clear prediction that the relativized NP is most
likely to be gapped if it is the subject of the relative clause, next most likely if it is the direct
object of the relative clause, etc. However, this is clearly not the case for Standard English: the
direct object position can be gapped (4a), whereas the subject position cannot (4b):
(4)
a.
b.
The man I called _____ was our neighbour. (direct object)
*
The man _____ called me was our neighbour. (subject)
English dialects, on the other hand, conform to this AH prediction. Examples like (4b) are
nothing unusual, at all; in fact, gapping of the subject position is an extremely widespread
phenomenon in non-standard varieties of English on and outside the British Isles:
(5)
a.
I have a friend ____ lives over there.
b.
It ain't the best ones ____ finish first.
So here we have a striking instance of the situation where the non-standard varieties of English
conform to a typological hierarchy whereas the standard variety does not.
The AH is also relevant when we look at another relativization strategy used in English,
namely the use of relative particles (i.e. uninflected relativizers, such as that in Standard English
or what and as in non-standard varieties). In typological surveys, English is usually classified as
a language which uses relative pronouns (i.e. who, whose, whom, which) as its primary
relativization strategy. However, this is only true for Standard English. As Tanja Herrmann
clearly shows in her comparative study of relative clauses in six English dialect areas (in
Kortmann et al. to appear 2004), in practically all these areas the relative particle strategy with
that outnumbers the wh-pronoun strategy by far in all (!) positions of the AH. So again we have a
case where Standard English is the odd one out and anything but the ideal representative of
English as a language type. Herrmann made two other extremely interesting observations
concerning the relative particles what and as: (a) spreading from the south, what is developing
into a supraregional relative marker in England, while as is receding even within those areas
(Central North and Central Midlands) to which it has been traditionally confined; (b) it is
interesting to observe the direction of the spread of what, on the one hand, and the recession of
as, on the other hand, with regard to the AH: what conquers new territory especially in the
subject position but increasingly also in the lower positions on the AH. As proceeds in the
opposite direction (receding from right to left on the AH), i.e. losing ground particularly in
positions lower than the subject position, keeping the latter as its only stronghold. We can thus
see the effect of frequency in the AH: the subject as most frequently relativized grammatical
function is at the same time the entrance gate for supraregional innovations and the last resort, as
it were, for regionally restricted relic forms.
The study of negation markers and strategies is another rewarding area for anybody
investigating dialects from a typological perspective (cf. especially Anderwald 2002a, 2003). For
one thing, multiple negation (or: negative concord) is another striking proof of the typological
"well-behavedness" of non-standard varieties of English (and other Germanic languages), since
multiple negation is the rule for many standard languages in Europe. Only the standard varieties
of Germanic (e.g. Standard English, Standard Dutch, Standard German) are the exceptions.
Furthermore, the invariant supraregional negation markers don't (i.e. also for he/she/it don't) and
ain't are in full accordance with the powerful typological concept of markedness: as Greenberg
found for many languages, morphological distinctions tend to be reduced under negation. As
Anderwald (2002b, to appear 2004) has also nicely shown, the alleged amn't gap (Hudson 2000)
in almost all varieties of English (*I amn't vs. I am not, aren't I) is anything but a gap and can
indeed be considered an extreme case of local (or: reversed) markedness. Whereas for all
auxiliary verbs negative contraction (e.g. haven't, hasn't, won't) is vastly preferred over auxiliary
contraction (e.g. 've not, 'd not, 'll not), we get the reverse picture for be. Even isn't (12.5%) and
aren't (3.5%) are used very rarely in the British Isles, so that the near absence of amn't in
standard as well as non-standard varieties is not a striking exception, but simply the tip of the
iceberg.
The motivation for this striking preference of be-contraction over negative contraction for
all other auxiliaries is most likely a cognitive one, namely the extremely low semantic content of
be. This leads me on to another typological concept which can be usefully applied to the
interpretation of dialect facts: iconicity. In the case of be-contraction we find an extreme formal
reduction of a semantically near-empty auxiliary, in other words: the amount of coding material
matches the semantic content to be coded. Another case in point is the fact that quite a number of
non-standard varieties in the British Isles and, in fact, around the world8 have made new use of
the number distinction for Past Tense be, i.e. the was-were distinction (cf. Anderwald 2002a).
These varieties use was for all persons in the singular and (!) plural in affirmative sentences,
while using weren't for all persons in singular (!) and plural in negative sentences,
remorphologizing the number distinction of Standard English as a polarity distinction. What we
have here is a showcase example of iconicity: a maximal difference in form (was vs. weren't)
codes a maximal semantic and cognitive difference (affirmation vs. negation). The relevant nonstandard varieties of English have clearly developed a more iconic polarity pattern than Standard
English has.
6. Future issues and perspectives
Undoubtedly, a lot still needs to be done in studying the grammar of English dialects from a
comparative (i.e. both cross-dialectal and cross-linguistic) perspective. At Freiburg, we have
only just started to lay the foundations for this task by charting the territory, engaging in some
in-depth pilot studies and, above all, by compiling the Freiburg Corpus of English Dialects. Once
FRED will be completed in the summer of 2003, there will be a first and reasonably solid
reference corpus available for comparative work on English dialect grammar.
Nevertheless it is always useful to look beyond the end of the day, as it were, and to keep
in mind which issues of a larger scope lie ahead of us, waiting to be tackled in the hopefully not
too distant future.
6.1. Generalizations
Pulling together all available information on grammatical variation across the English dialects,
we should at some point be able to take an empirically solid stand on the following question, or
rather set of questions: Do non-standard varieties of English exhibit a higher degree of regularity
and consistency (e.g. in terms of (more) consistent analytic varieties) than Standard English
does? On the basis of what the Freiburg project has brought to light about English dialects in the
course of the last years, we can say that there are quite a few domains of dialect grammar that
indeed seem to justify such generalizations. Here is a non-exhaustive list of examples for
regularization, analyticity, and consistency.
6.1.1. In the following domains of dialect grammar we find a higher degree of regularization
in morphology (typically resulting in a higher degree of simplification):
•
irregular verbs (e.g. normally fewer and/or levelled irregular verb forms compared with
Standard English)9;
•
inflectional paradigms in the Present Tense: e.g. be (including was/were-generalization),
have: in many dialects either in all persons (singular and plural) -s (e.g. I has, you has) or
no –s (e.g. he have);
•
formation patterns of reflexives: most English dialects consistently use possessive
pronoun + self/selves (e.g. hisself, theirself/-ves), and not the mixed system of Standard
English using partly possessive pronouns (myself, yourself) and partly the object forms
of personal pronouns (himself, themselves);
•
negation strategies and negative markers (invariant ain't, don't).
6.1.2. Instances of a more consistent use of analytic constructions are the following:
•
analytic (instead of case-marked) forms in the possessive: e.g. in relative clauses what his
or that his instead of whose;
•
do-periphrasis (recall the unstressed do in affirmative sentences in Southwest England
mentioned in section 4).
Tristram (1997: 413) too, for example, interprets the development of this specifically
Southwestern feature10 in terms of simplification and consistency (more exactly analyticity):11
"English ... in all its varieties after the Early Modern English period, ... made the greatest use of
the pattern [i.e. do-periphrasis, B.K.] by grammaticalising DO/DID as tense markers in questions
and negative statements/imperatives as well as in emphasis... DO/DID also lost their personal
inflections, except for DOES (3rd pers. sg.), in most Englishes. The structural gap in the
realisation of affirmative statements is neatly filled by the English South West (Elworthy 1886,
1879). This seems to be an original innovation, quite along the lines of inflectional simplification
and increase in analyticity. [my emphasis, B.K.]" Indeed, it looks as if the grammaticalization of
do as a tense marker in unemphatic affirmative sentences has progressed if we consider the
speech of younger speakers from the Southwest, younger meaning being born considerably later
than 1900. In the study by Weltens (1983), acceptability tests with informants in the English
Southwest showed that "originally habitual markers seem now to have been introduced into nonhabitual contexts also, and are therefore in 'free variation' with the simple tenses" (1983: 62). In
other words, the formal distinction between periphrastic do, on the one hand, and Simple Present
and Past, on the other, no longer seems to code a semantic distinction (habitual vs. punctual), or
at least increasingly less so. It thus appears that the unemphatic do in affirmative statements is on
its way towards an analytic alternative for coding events in the present and past, which it indeed
already is in many dialects of Dutch and German.
6.1.3. But also in other respects than analyticity can we observe a higher degree of consistency
in the grammars of dialects than in Standard English. Again some examples:
•
do-periphrasis in the Southwest evidently figures here again: do is consistently used as (at
least an optional) analytic tense marker in unstressed affirmative sentences in addition to
the
Standard
English
use
of
do
in
this
function
in
questions,
negative
statements/questions/imperatives, and emphatic statements;
•
relativization (zero-relativization in object and (!) subject position; cf. section 5);
•
subject-verb inversion in normal and embedded interrogatives, as for example in Irish or
Hebridean English (Did she come yesterday? vs. I wondered did/had she come
yesterday);
•
was/were-generalization: many dialects have abandoned the was/were distinction we
know from Standard English; alternatively, they either generalize was or, less frequently,
were (for all persons in singular and plural, in affirmative and negative sentences) or, as
described in section 5, use was for all persons in singular and plural in affirmatives only
while reserving were for the corresponding use in negative sentences;
•
loss of subject-verb-agreement.
Next to the tendency towards analyticity, the loss of subject-verb-agreement definitely is the
most far-reaching property of dialects in terms of consistency. Just recall the following dialect
features, which all have in common that they either completely do away with or at least
considerably weaken subject-verb agreement:
•
the Northern Subject Rule (see section 4 above); in connection with the NSR also
•
the use of there's, there is, there was in existential/presentational sentences with plural
subjects (e.g. There's/There is/There was two men waiting in the hall, There's cars
outside the church), which has made it even into the "top ten" of most widely distributed
features of dialect morphosyntax in urban Britain (cf. Cheshire/Edwards/Whittle 1993)
and is firmly established in spontaneous spoken English (cf. also section 6.2);
•
was/were-generalization (see above);
•
loss of subject-verb agreement in negative sentences through invariant don't and ain't; as
Hudson (2000: 211) has already pointed out: "... I shall assume that ain't has no inherent
agreement features, so (just like a typical past-tense verb) it is compatible with any
subject. [...] The result is a grammar that is more consistent:
• No word has more than one inflectional suffix, in contrast with ESE [English
Standard English] where isn't, hasn't and doesn't all contain -s as well as -n't.
• No negative auxiliary has agreement, whereas ESE has agreement in have, be
and do but not in modals."
Taking all these points together one must agree with Hudson (1999: 205) that English dialects
seem to be on their way towards a system as we know it from the continental Scandinavian
languages, lacking subject-verb agreement. At the same time, this is one more piece of evidence
for how different the picture would be for typologists if they took the non-standard varieties of a
language into consideration along with the standard variety. English for example, in contrast to
Norwegian and Swedish, is classified as a language with strict subject-verb agreement in a recent
typological survey of that linguistic area in Europe which (most likely) constitutes Standard
Average European (cf. Map 107.11 in Haspelmath 2001: 1500).
Here I better stop indulging in the "big" issues future investigations of English dialect
grammar should ultimately allow us to take a stand on. Of course, it is very easy to oversimplify
and ignore counterevidence, which certainly exists, when arguing on such a high level of
generalization concerning dialects, languages and directions of language change, which is why
we need to be cautious and wait with final judgements until a much broader range of evidence
from standard and non-standard varieties of English (and of other languages; see section 6.3) will
be available. This leads me to the last two sections under the heading of future perspectives.
6.2. Broadening the database and scope of comparison
Within the realm of (non-standard) varieties of English, the Freiburg project will broaden its
database in the next funding period (2003-2005) by using elicitation questionnaires geared
towards the collection of morphosyntax data. Anyone working with corpora knows their limits,
especially when focussing on syntax. Even in very large corpora like the British National Corpus
certain constructions will occur only very rarely. This problem is much greater in a dialect
corpus like FRED. Although its size in unparalleled in any other dialect corpus, for individual
dialects, FRED still holds comparatively little data.12 But there is not only a quantitative problem
with FRED which calls out for collecting additional data via new fieldwork. There is also a
simple qualitative problem once it comes, for example, to the study of tense or mood/modality:
since FRED mainly consists of oral history interviews (i.e. stories about the past), anyone who
wants to investigate markers or constructions used for the expression of future time, volition, or
condition, to name just three examples, will not find much relevant data in FRED. So, both for
quantitative and qualitative reasons, fieldwork based on questionnaires is unavoidable, apart
from the fact that by choosing, for each location, informants from different sexes and three
different age groups we can systematically include a sociolinguistic (i.e. apparent-time) along
with a real-time dimension in our project.
For this purpose, two types of questionnaires will be designed: exploratory questionnaires
for areas of morphosyntax where we know that interesting variation exists, but where the
territory needs to be mapped more carefully before more fine-grained questions (e.g. questions
involving semantic and/or pragmatic factors) can be asked. Questions of the latter type, on the
other hand, will be reserved for the specialist or expert questionnaires. These are based on,
among other things, the completed Ph.D. theses within the project. Both types of questionnaires
include questions involving acceptability judgements. In designing the questionnaires the
Freiburg group can draw upon two types of models: elicitation questionnaires known from
language typology and questionnaires as they have been employed in two other research projects
on dialect syntax, in Switzerland for Swiss dialect syntax and in The Netherlands and Belgium
for a large project on Dutch and Flemish dialect syntax (cf. section 6.3 below).
Independently of extending the database for research on dialect grammar via new,
questionnaire-based fieldwork, there is another road that should be taken. For anyone who is
interested in mapping cross-dialectal variation in English, the restriction of the Freiburg project
to the British Isles, and primarily to England, must seem rather arbitrary. Granted that regional
variation in the British Isles is the richest in the English-speaking world, there are still many nonstandard varieties of English in other parts of the world which need to be included in such a
survey. So here we have a rich territory for future research.13 This is also why Susanne Wagner,
for example, in her Ph.D. thesis on gendered pronouns did not only explore this phenomenon in
the English Southwest, but also in Newfoundland. For Lukas Pietsch' study of the Northern
Subject Rule it would have been wonderful had the data of the Tape-Recorded Survey of
Hiberno-English Speech been made accessible for transcription.14
If we broaden the database by adopting a "global perspective" on variation in English, we
are also bound to make progress on what Jack Chambers calls vernacular universals (in nonstandard varieties of English and other languages) in the domain of morphosyntax. In Chambers
(to appear 2004) he identifies the following candidates for such morphosyntactic universals: (1)
conjugation regularization, or levelling of irregular verb forms (e.g. I seen, Mary heared); (2)
default singulars, or subject-verb non-concord (cf. section 6.2 above on this point); (3) multiple
negation; (4) copula absence, or deletion (e.g. She smart, We going as soon as possible). The
problem for confirming the "universality" of these and possibly more vernacular features is the
lack of a sufficient amount of reliable data for many varieties. For a start, however, i.e. for a first
comprehensive overview of the range and nature of morphosyntactic variation in the Englishspeaking world, the publication of Kortmann/Burridge/Mesthrie/Schneider (eds.) Handbook of
Varieties of English, Vol. 2: Morphology and Syntax in 2004 will be a major step. The
contributions to this handbook provide solid structural descriptions of the grammars of nearly all
varieties of English around the world (including English-based pidgins and creoles).
Comparative work of the kind sketched in this section will also allow us to work on the
following question, which is crucial from the perspective of ongoing language change, especially
the evolution of a (spoken) standard: Which grammatical phenomena are increasingly less
locally or regionally bound and develop into properties of a general spoken non-standard English
that is not geographically restricted? The survey of dialect grammar conducted for urban
varieties in Britain in the late 1980s, which also yielded a set of features representing, in
Chambers' terminology, vernacular universals (e.g. them for those, ain't/in't, generalization of
was: we was singing, there's/there was with plural subjects, what as relative particle, absence of
plural marking with numerals: four pound of flour),15 can thus be complemented by data from
regional varieties in England, on the one hand, and non-standard varieties around the world, on
the other hand.
6.3. The European Perspective
Another fact bears witness to the new and bright prospects for the study of dialect grammar I
have sketched in this paper. This is the fact that, independently of each other, five research
projects on the study of dialect grammar sprung up in six European countries, all roughly
beginning in the year 2000 (cf. Barbiers et al. 2002 for a selection of studies conducted within
four of these projects). Besides the Freiburg project, these are projects on the syntax of Dutch
and Flemish dialects (the SAND project in Amsterdam (Hans Bennis, Sjef Barbiers), Antwerpen
(Johan van der Auwera) and Gent (Magda Devos)), of Swiss German dialects (Elvira Glaser,
Zurich), of Italian dialects (Cecilia Poletto and Paola Benincà, Padua), and of Romani dialects
(Yaron Matras, Manchester).16 It should be obvious that including the facts from these projects
will provide an ever more solid basis for tackling the major generalizations concerning nonstandard varieties of languages outlined in sections 6.1 and 6.2.
These five projects are currently joining forces, spearheading an initiative for an international
research network on European dialect syntax. This focus on Europe invites at least three further
lines of comparative research on dialect grammar from a typological point of view. First of all,
comparative studies of dialect syntax within one language can be extended to the dialects of
genetically closely related languages. After all, just as for the study of English dialect grammar
the restriction of the Freiburg project to the British Isles is in a way arbitrary, it is equally
arbitrary to restrict cross-dialectal studies to just one member of the West Germanic language
family. To any native speaker of these languages, the parallels between the morphosyntax of the
various West Germanic regional dialects in many domains are quite striking. A similar
broadening of the scope of comparative dialect research is urgently called for in other European
language families, too.
From this kind of broadening along genetic lines, as it were, it is but a small (and ultimately
necessary) step to include the facts from the grammars of dialects into areal typologies of Europe
that explore the geographical distribution of individual morphosyntactic phenomena (including
grammaticalization phenomena) and possibly identify linguistic convergence areas on a smaller
scale. It is amazing that, so far, even in most recent areal typologies for Europe (excluding the
long established research on the Balkan linguistic area) dialects played practically no role. This
holds true, in particular, for the research that was conducted within the major international
project "Typology of European Languages" (EUROTYP), which ran from 1990-1994. The
ultimate question the inclusion of dialects in European areal typology might answer is what the
"real", i.e. spoken non-standard, landscape of Europe looks like: What is the nature of "real"
Standard Average European, as hypothesized by Benjamin Lee Whorf almost 60 years ago and
found largely confirmed by the EUROTYP project (cf. Haspelmath 2001)?
7. Conclusion
It was the aim of this paper to introduce what appears to be a most promising field of research in
English dialectology and comparative linguistics, in general, offering among other things a host
of subjects to be worked on by postgraduates. Indeed, I dare to claim that of all branches of
dialectology the study of dialect grammar offers the greatest research potential and may soon
determine the perception of dialectology within linguistics, especially from the point of view of
generative syntactic theory and, crucial for this paper, research working within a functionaltypological-cognitive paradigm. The rise of the study of dialect grammar within the latter strand
of research is documented, amongst other things, by workshops the author was asked to organize
(e.g. at the Anglistentag Vienna 2001 or the Methods XI 2002 in Joensuu) and, partly growing
out of them, a number of recent and forthcoming publications (notably the papers of the
workshop "New approaches to dialectology" in Kastovsky/Kaltenböck/Reichl (2002) as well as
various publications by Kortmann; see references). More importantly, the fact that currently
there are five research projects on dialect grammar running in six European countries bears
witness to this budding and indeed already blossoming field of linguistic research. With these
research projects spearheading a Europe-wide research initiative on European dialect syntax,
there is substantial hope that we can soon tackle such challenging major issues in the study of
non-standard varieties as sketched in section 6.
Finally, we may conclude that the standard varieties of languages, and Standard British
English is a perfect case in point, may and indeed often do not present the appropriate picture of
the grammatical structure of the relevant language. Typologists must be (made) aware of this fact
since otherwise they are running the risk of comparing the incomparable, and of arriving at
results and generalizations which are bound to be heavily distorted, all the more so since the
ultimate clash is not between standard and non-standard varieties, but between (predominantly)
written and (almost exclusively) spoken varieties. The basic message, then, from dialectologists
(and, indeed, anybody studying language-internal variation) to typologists is obvious: If we want
to learn more about real language, about generalizations concerning and explanations accounting
for patterns of linguistic variation across the languages of the world (including functional
motivations of natural language change), we must not ignore the rich linguistic variation at our
doorstep to which we have relatively easy access, i.e. variation across dialects (be they regional
or social).
Notes
* I would like to thank Lieselotte Anderwald and Susanne Wagner for their comments on an
earlier version of this paper.
1. An exception in this respect form the sociolinguistic studies by Tagliamonte and her research
team published from the late 1990s onwards (e.g. Tagliamonte 1999, 2002, 2003).
2. For further information on the project and the corpus on which it is based, please consult:
http://www.anglistik.uni-freiburg.de/institut/lskortmann/index.html#Projects). I would like to
gratefully acknowledge the generous support by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft of
project KO 1181/1-2-3.
3. For more information on FRED, consult the project homepage given in footnote 2.
4. Full reports on the relevant studies (Hermann on relativization, Pietsch on the Northern
Subject Rule, Wagner on pronominal gender marking) will be published in the first volume
growing out of the Freiburg project (Kortmann et al., to appear 2004); for negation, the reader is
referred especially to the BNC-based studies of Anderwald 2002a and 2003, which have grown
out of the first Ph.D. thesis that was completed within the context of the Freiburg project.
5. Compare Trudgill (1999: ch. 4) for numerous examples of regionally restricted grammatical
features in traditional English dialects, and papers by Pietsch and Wagner (in
Kortmann/Herrmann/Pietsch/Wagner to appear 2004) on the regional distribution of selected
morphosyntactic features in the British Isles in post-SED dialects (mostly based on the FRED
data).
6. John Kirk of Queen's University, Belfast, kindly gave us access to this corpus; compare also
footnote 14.
7. Another surprise may be noted in passing: upon examining the SED data on the NSR in the
North of England, Pietsch found a striking historical stability of the distribution of the NSR: the
southern boundary of the NSR has remained almost identical with the Chester-Wash line from
Late Middle English which separates 3rd singular -s from 3rd singular -th. Compare also
Klemola (2002) on continuity and change in English dialect grammar.
8. Most of these developments are of course present in other varieties of English outside of
Great Britain. However, documentation has so far been mostly sporadic, so that my account will
remain restricted to developments based on FRED.
9. Note that this is another morphosyntactic vernacular universal Chambers (to appear 2004)
identifies; cf. also section 6.2.
10. In the Southwest the use of unstressed do in affirmatives can be traced back to the 13th/14th
century. From there it spread to other parts of England, but receded again to the Southwest from
about the 17th/early 18th century onwards, after centuries during which it had been widely and
extensively used in Late Middle English and Early Modern English, even in writing.
11. On the serious problems that this consistency of do as a tense marker poses for generative
syntactic theory (at least before the advent of Optimality Theory) compare Kortmann (2002).
12. Compare LOB and Brown corpora for British and American Standard English, respectively,
with one million words each. These are now generally agreed to be too small for a number of
syntactic analyses.
13. This approach has been taken, for example, in Kortmann (to appear 2004) on the
grammaticalization of do as a tense and aspect marker in varieties of English across the world.
14. The complete set of audio files of the Tape-Recorded Survey of Hiberno-English Speech
(TRS) is stored at the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum at Belfast. Transcripts only exist, due
to the efforts of John Kirk, Belfast, for the Northern Irish part of this survey, i.e. the Northern
Ireland Transcribed Corpus of Speech mentioned earlier. Individual subsets of the TRS are
accessible on the following homepage by Raymond Hickey (University of Essen) which, beyond
Hickey (2003), also provides a wealth of references to other sources on Irish English and
Hickey's own highly commendable fieldwork on phonology and grammar: http://www.uniessen.de/IERC.
15. For the methodology and major results of this survey compare Cheshire/Edwards/Whittle
(1993). These authors consider the "universal" properties they identified in their questionnairebased survey as part of "standardizing non-standard English". The relevant properties were used
by at least 80% of their informants.
16. For more information consult the project homepages:
http://www.meertens.nl/projecten/sand/SAND.html;
http://www.researchprojects.unizh.ch/phil/unit64100/area477/p1794.htm;
http://asis-cnr.unipd.it; http://lings.ln.man.ac.uk/Html/RMS/proj.html
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