Grammatical variation in British English dialects
Subtitle: a study in corpus-based dialectometry
By: Benedikt Szmrecsanyi
Series: Studies in English language
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Cambridge, [England]; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 211
ISBN-13: 9781107003453
Subjects: Languages; Grammaticalization; English language; LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / General; Dialects; Variation; Syntax
Description: "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"--
Notes: Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Freiburg, 2011.
Table of contents: title: Machine generated contents note: 1. Introduction; 2. Data and methods; 3. The feature catalogue; 4. Surveying the forest; 5. Is morphosyntactic variability gradient? Exploring dialect continua; 6. Classification: the dialect area scenario; 7. Back to the features; 8. Summary and discussion; 9. Outlook and concluding remarks.