A comparative grammar of british english dialects

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A comparative grammar of British English dialects : agreement, gen-der, relative clauses / by Bernd Kortmann … [et al.].. Contents: Th

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Topics in English Linguistics 50.1

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A comparative grammar of British English dialects : agreement,

gen-der, relative clauses / by Bernd Kortmann … [et al.].

p cm ⫺ (Topics in English linguistics ; 50.1)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents: The Freiburg English Dialect Project and corpus / Bernd

Kortmann, Susanne Wagner ⫺ Relative clauses in English dialects of

the British Isles / Tanja Herrmann ⫺ “Some do and some doesn’t” :

verbal concord variation in the north of the British Isles / Lukas

Pietsch ⫺ Gender in English pronouns : southwest England /

Su-sanne Wagner

ISBN 3-11-018299-8 (hardcover : alk paper)

1 English language ⫺ Dialects ⫺ Great Britain 2 English

lan-guage ⫺ Great Britain ⫺ Grammar 3 English language ⫺ Relative

clauses 4 English language ⫺ Agreement 5 English language ⫺

Gender I Kortmann, Bernd, 1960 ⫺ II Series.

PE1721.C66 2005

427 ⫺dc22

2005001607

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek

Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the Internet at ⬍http://dnb.ddb.de⬎.

ISBN 3-11-018299-8

” Copyright 2005 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG, 10785 Berlin

All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mecha- nical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, with- out permission in writing from the publisher.

Cover design: Christopher Schneider, Berlin.

Printed in Germany.

The present volume, the first in a series of volumes which will be published at irregular intervals, tries to set an example as to how this gap in English dialectology can be filled Secondly, it will do away with another problem that has beset the study of English dialect syntax for many

decades, namely the lack 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 Just a fraction of the more than 1300 questions in the

SED questionnaire was explicitly designed to collect morphological and

syntactic information Only since the late 1980s have efforts been made at

compiling large data collections, such as the Survey of British Dialect

Grammar (Cheshire, Edwards and Whittle 1989), the Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (NECTE; see Allen et al., forthcoming), and,

largest of all, the computerized Freiburg English Dialect Corpus It is the latter, FRED for short, which will take centre stage in this volume Thirdly,

all studies in this volume are informed by a typological approach to English dialect grammar (apart from the fact that two of the dialect phenomena investigated here, namely the Northern Subject Rule and pronominal gender, are typologically very rare) This approach is the hallmark of the Freiburg research group on English dialect syntax, initiated and coordinated

by Bernd Kortmann, and will be outlined in the scene-setting paper by Kortmann and Wagner It is in this paper, too, that the nature and design of

FRED, and its advantages for both qualitative and quantitative analyses of

dialect phenomena will be discussed in some detail

The subject matter of the three studies forming the backbone of this volume can briefly be characterized as follows: Tanja Herrmann examines (adnominal) relative clauses in six dialect areas of the British Isles (Central Midlands, Central North, Central Southwest, East Anglia, Northern Ireland, Scotland) The results of this cross-dialectal study she relates to typological hierarchies, particularly to Keenan and Comrie’s (1977) Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy The Accessibility Hierarchy is largely verified for all relative clause formation strategies found in the data, including the zero

relative marker strategy (as in The man _ called me was our neighbour).

From a diachronic perspective, the Accessibility Hierarchy also helps to reveal the pattern underlying the way individual relative markers (e.g the

relative particles as and what) enter or exit an existent relative marker

system

Lukas Pietsch investigates, synchronically as well as diachronically, the so-called Northern Subject Rule (NSR), a feature found in the Northern dialects of England, but also in Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Republic

of Ireland This rule is concerned with 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: I sing vs *I sings, Birds sings, and

I sing and dances.

Susanne Wagner, finally, provides a comprehensive account of a special semantic system of (pronominal) gender marking, which is distinctive of the traditional dialects in Southwest England 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 Pass the bread – it’s over

there (bread = mass noun) and Pass the loaf – he’s over there (loaf =

count noun) Most gendered pronouns are masculine pronominal forms (he,

him and Southwestern un, en < OE hine) referring to inanimate referents

Acknowledgments

All authors most gratefully acknowledge the generous support by the

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft Without the funding of the Projects KO

1181/1-1,2,3 over a five-year period (2000-2005) the studies published here

and the compilation of FRED, the Freiburg English Dialect Corpus, would

have been impossible

References

Allen, Will, Joan Beal, Karen Corrigan, Warren Maguire, and Hermann Moisl forthc Taming Unconventional Digital Voices: The Newcastle Electronic

Corpus of Tyneside English In Using Unconventional Digital

Language Corpora Vol I: Synchronic Corpora, Joan Beal, Karen

Corrigan and Herman Moisl (eds.) Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan

Cheshire, Jenny, Viv Edwards, and Pamela Whittle

1989 "Urban British dialect grammar: The question of dialect levelling

English World-Wide 10: 185-225

Kortmann, Bernd, Edgar W Schneider in collaboration with Kate Burridge,

Rajend Mesthrie, and Clive Upton (eds.)

2004 A Handbook of Varieties of English, Vol 2: Morphology and Syntax.

Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter

Milroy, John, and Lesley Milroy (eds.)

1993 Real English The Grammar of English Dialects in the British Isles.

London/New York: Longman

Tagliamonte, Sali

1999 Was/were variation across the generations: View from the city of

York Language Variation and Change 10: 153–191

2002 Variation and change in the British relative marker system In

Relativisation in the North Sea Littoral, Patricia Poussa (ed.), 147–

165 Munich: LINCOM EUROPA

2003 ‘Every place has a different toll’: Determinants of grammatical

variation in cross-variety perspective In Determinants of Linguistic

Variation, Günter Rohdenburg, and Britta Mondorf (eds.), 531–554

Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter

Trudgill, Peter, and Jack K Chambers (eds.)

1991 Dialects of English Studies in Grammatical Variation London/New

York: Longman

Preface v

Bernd Kortmann The Freiburg English Dialect Project and Corpus (FRED) 1

Bernd Kortmann and Susanne Wagner 1 Comparative dialect grammar from a typological perspective 1

2 The Freiburg English Dialect Corpus (FRED) 4

3 Linguistic consequences of using oral history material 13

Relative clauses in English dialects of the British Isles 21

Tanja Herrmann Abstract 21

1 Introduction 21

2 Data 22

3 Overall distribution of relative clauses and relative markers 24

4 Previous investigations of relative markers 28

5 Restrictiveness/nonrestrictiveness 38

6 Personality/nonpersonality 41

7 Preposition placement 45

8 Accessibility Hierarchy 48

9 Resumptive pronouns 70

10 Which as ‘connector’? 87

11 Conclusion 94

Appendix 1 97

Appendix 2 105

“Some do and some doesn’t”: Verbal concord variation in the north of the British Isles 125

Lukas Pietsch Abstract 125

1 Introduction 125

2 The Northern Subject Rule: Descriptive problems 128

3 Data from twentieth-century northern dialects 132

4 The history of the Northern Subject Rule 173

5 Theoretical accounts of the Northern Subject Rule 179

6 Discussion: Variation and usage-based theories 190

Gender in English pronouns: Southwest England 211

Susanne Wagner 1 Introduction 211

2 Gendered pronouns 215

3 Gender in English and elsewhere 221

4 The corpora 235

5 Special referent classes 251

6 Non-dialectal studies of gender assignment 261

7 Persistence of gendered pronouns 275

8 SED – Basic Material 285

9 The SED fieldworker notebooks data 292

10 Southwest England oral history material 319

11 Material from Newfoundland 339

12 Overall summary 346

Appendix 353

(Additional) corpus material 353

Index 368

Bernd Kortmann and Susanne Wagner

1 Comparative dialect grammar from a typological perspective

The Freiburg project started in the late 1990s and has received major

funding from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft from spring 2000 until

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, in a first step, we determine the cross-dialectal variation observable in individual domains of grammar (in the present volume: negation, relative clauses, pronominal and agreement systems) before, in a second step, judging it against the cross-linguistic variation described in typological studies Both dialect syntacticians and typologists are bound to profit from this kind of approach (cf Kortmann, ed 2004 for a collection of studies on dialects in Europe conducted in this spirit) 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

In the present volume, the typological perspective is most prominent in Herrmann’s study on relativization (not surprisingly so, given the fame of Keenan and Comrie’s NP Accessibility Hierarchy in language typology)

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 (2a), whereas the subject position cannot (2b):

English dialects, on the other hand, conform to the AH prediction Examples like (2b) are nothing unusual, at all; in fact, gapping of the subject position is an extremely widespread phenomenon in non-standard varieties of English in and outside the British Isles:

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 For further ways in which the AH is relevant when looking at other relativization strategies used in English dialects compare Herrmann’s comparative study of relative clauses in six English dialect areas in this volume

Another rewarding area for anybody investigating dialects from a typological perspective is the study of negation markers and strategies This subsystem of English dialect grammar has been investigated in depth by Lieselotte Anderwald, a senior member of the Freiburg research team (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,

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 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 world 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, thus 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 standard varieties of English have clearly developed a more iconic polarity pattern than Standard English has

non-Having outlined and illustrated the typological approach to comparative dialect grammar established by the Freiburg research group, we need to mention at least briefly that there is of course also a generativist perspective from which especially the dialect grammars of Italian, Dutch and German (much less so English dialects) have been investigated As a matter of fact, generativists discovered the significance of dialect syntax for linguistic theorizing and models of syntax much earlier than typologists This generativist interest in microparametric syntax began with the advent of the Principles and Parameters approach in the 1980s and has steadily increased ever since (cf., for example, Black and Motapanyane 1996 or various contributions to Barbiers, Cornips and van der Kleij 2002), finding its way even into generative theories based on Optimality Theory (cf., for example, the Stochastic OT account of morphosyntactic variation in English by Bresnan and Deo 2001) In this volume, the generativist perspective will come in only where relevant publications on the dialect phenomena investigated here exist

2 The Freiburg English Dialect Corpus (FRED)

Given the aims of the Freiburg project it was first of all necessary to compile a database which would allow to conduct serious qualitative and quantitative morphosyntactic research across English dialects The result is

the computerized Freiburg English Dialect Corpus (FRED), which has

been compiled over a period of roughly five years (including the

digitization of some 120 hours of audio material) FRED consists of

approximately 2.5 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

informants who were recruited for the Survey of English Dialects (SED).

2.1 Principles of compilation

Firstly, the corpus was designated to permit the investigation of phenomena

of non-standard morphosyntax (rather than analyses of phonetic or

phonological details) Features of syntax are – almost by definition – much rarer than features of phonetics and phonology and very large quantities of text are therefore necessary (According to some estimates, about 40 times the amount of text is needed for a syntactic analysis as opposed to a phonetic one.) This considerably restricted the practicality of collecting our own corpus from scratch Instead, we decided to try to compile a corpus from materials that were already available We decided against collecting material with the help of questionnaires in the first phase of the project Questionnaires were however designed and distributed in the second phase

of the project when, on the basis of extensive corpus analyses, interesting, transitional or rare phenomena became apparent that could not be further

investigated with the help of FRED alone.

Secondly, we decided to collect material that would best be classified as traditional dialect data This means that we explicitly tried to find material

from speakers who grew up before the Second World War, as this date

seems to be the major cataclysmic event after which wide-ranging social and economic changes (with concomitant linguistic changes) came into effect For example, highly increased mobility after WWII led to dialect levelling on a hitherto unknown scale (see for example Williams and Kerswill 1999: 149); mass affluence resulted, amongst other things, in television sets becoming easily available and spreading at least passive knowledge of the standard language; increased public spending made sure that education changed not only qualitatively but also quantitatively, such that children leaving school at age 11 or 12 – not unusual for lower class children only 60 or 70 years ago – is no longer possible, and so on Only by concentrating on speakers born before WWII could we at least have a chance that our data would still be “dialectal” in a regional sense, and be comparable to older dialect descriptions and dialect data (on the

background of speaker selection for the SED, see Orton 1962: 14) There are a number of other arguments and a priori considerations which

contributed to this decision: We had established contact with various researchers, research groups and private individuals who were either in possession of similar materials or were already working with such data, and who had kindly offered us access to them Moreover, the only existing sources on variation in morphosyntax are based on traditional material,

most importantly the SED (Orton et al 1962–1971) To guarantee comparability between these materials, it was essential that FRED should

also consist of traditional dialect material without having to take into account factors like mobility or the influence of mass media

Due also to time constraints, but mainly for the reasons detailed above,

it was considered impossible from the outset to record, digitise and

transcribe all data that should make up FRED ourselves Based on our

research objectives, we were looking for large quantities of traditional regional speech, preferably by older local speakers with strong family affiliations in the area, that would record the use of speakers who grew up before WWII, or even better, before WWI This meant that we were looking for material preferably from the 1970s and 1980s, recording older speakers, or from the 1990s, if these recorded very old speakers Our material had to be recorded in acceptable quality for linguistic analysis, ideally even including transcripts that were reliable on a word-by-word basis, and – most important of all – the material had to be more or less freely available to us as researchers who had not originally been part of the research design These criteria suggested a new source that has so far not –

or hardly – been used for dialectological purposes, namely tape recordings and transcripts from oral history projects

2.2 The role of oral history

As defined by the Oral History Society, “[o]ral history is the recording of people’s memories It is the living history of everyone’s unique life

experiences” (Oral History Society at http://www.oralhistory.org.uk) Oral

history collections sometimes originate from projects (short- or long-term) undertaken by an individual (sometimes also a group of individuals or an institution), typically lay persons, not professional historians, with an interest in a specific theme or topic, often just recording life memories

circumstances of an interview Interviewees are generally pensioners in their 60s or older, and only rarely do we find projects that have as many

The recording situation makes oral history material ideal for linguistic investigation The interviewers were usually true insiders, coming from the area, often still speaking the dialect themselves, which tends to relax the interview situation considerably A second advantage is that the speaker’s

attention was genuinely on what was being said, rather than on how it was

being said Fortunately, the Oral History Society advises all potential

and these are the places where oral history material can be found today across Great Britain.5

2.3 From original recording to text in FRED – the steps and processes

Members of the Oral History Society are advised to at least “[w]rite a synopsis of the interview which briefly lists in order all the main themes,

mentioned But, of course, for anyone thinking about long-term work with the material, a transcript is a very good way of allowing people from outside to get an impression of the content of the interview without actually having to listen to the tapes, which is a very time-consuming business The intentions for the future use of transcripts largely determine how the interview was transcribed, “how” here referring particularly to the (unfortunately very common) practice of “normalizing” the speakers’ language Since oral history projects as a rule do not involve the employment of a professional transcriber, this is the usual course of events, which is of course perfectly justified for oral history purposes Just to give one example consisting of several actually occurring utterances, consider (4) which could end up as (5):

(4) That pot? Oh, I, I don’t know, I don’t remember what I made he for

I don’t collect no pots now

(5) I don’t remember what I made that pot for I don’t collect pots now

“Normalization” here has eradicated three morphosyntactic dialect features

(he = pot; he here used in an oblique context; double negation don’t no),

not to mention all the “superfluous data” (repetitions and so on) that are simply left out This kind of standardized re-written text is of course much more useful to the general public than a transcript that uses so many instances of “eye-dialect” to represent non-standard pronunciation as well

as dialect that it is difficult to follow the line of argument

Despite the obvious linguistic drawbacks, the Freiburg research group was very glad to have transcripts of at least some of its material Although these were highly deficient from a dialectological point of view, they at least solved such difficult problems for us as deciphering correctly some specialist vocabulary, unusual place names, personal names and so on, such

as the names of different apple sorts used for cider making We then

carefully compared existing transcripts with the original tapes and inserted all morphological, syntactic and discourse features, taking out irrelevant phonetic or phonological features and features of pure eye-dialect (compare 6 with 6'):

re-(6) And the farmer wot my gran used ter ee used ter have a white high healed collar.

healed collar (FRED Wil_011)

For the rest of the material where no transcripts were available, we transcribed the original tapes ourselves, mostly with the help of native speakers who either worked on the project or were associated with it in related research projects In addition, all transcripts were carefully checked

by dialectologically trained research assistants

As a result, the actual transcripts used for FRED are verbatim

equivalents of the spoken versions: hesitations, repetitions, false starts of the same sentence and so on are all included

(7) #Oh well now, I tell you, when I first made my will, Mr (gap ‘name’)

my lawyer, (unclear) oh yes (/unclear) he’s still alive, (trunc)

I-(/trunc) I told him I I I says, I want to leave the Salvation Army a bit

of money, and I have done (FRED Nott_016)

In addition, as stated above, and most importantly for our research purposes, all morphosyntactic dialect features have been reinserted (indicated in bold print below)

(8) … there used to be a Ginnet what we used to call was a Ginnet, he

were a nice eating apple, a nice sweet apple and a good apple for

cider #When them apples were ripe you could pick them up and

could press them like that and you’d see your thumb mark in them or

any apple really when he’s ripe, wadn’t it, but when he’s not ripe

he’s hard, isn’t he, (unclear) you ain’t gonna, (/unclear) well,

anything at all (FRED Som_001)

Among the features likely to have been “corrected” in the original

transcript are, as in (8) for example, a what-relative, demonstrative them

and “gendered” pronouns

A variety of phonological features were also kept, either if they were already represented in the original transcripts, or if we suspected that they might interact with morphosyntax, for example contracted forms like

wanna, gonna, s’pose and so on It should be noted that we use the

semi-phonetic form mi for /mi:/ used as the possessive pronoun not as

“eye-dialect” but in order to facilitate searches (For severe criticism of gratuitous eye-dialect, see for example Preston 1985, 2000) The

orthographic form me, although widespread in other corpora, not only

suggests a certain etymology for this form (at worst, a “substitution” of the object form of the personal pronoun for the possessive function), but also complicates computer-based searches considerably, as all instances of the

object case of the personal pronoun (He saw me) have to be manually

excluded, at least as long as the corpus is not tagged for word class yet

We also represent certain paralinguistic features like laughter, long pauses, or indistinct stretches of conversation (marked as gaps, unclear passages or truncated words; see also the examples above) All these features are indicated in the transcripts by specific tags to minimize the risk

discourse level In this way we have tried to remedy the linguistic shortcomings of the original oral history material as far as possible

As mentioned above, extralinguistic variables in FRED are constrained

by intention – FRED is not designed to be a representative sociolinguistic

corpus, but a regionally representative corpus of as broad a dialect speech

as possible As has already been pointed out, our oral history projects concentrated on interviewing older people These older people are typically very local, that is they still live in the place where they were born, without having moved outside the region for any considerable stretch of time Also,

typical FRED speakers usually left school about the age of fourteen, often

much earlier, certainly not progressing to higher education Finally, most of our speakers are male – as is well known, women tend to use more prestigious, in many cases more standard forms of speech where these are available to them (see for example Chambers and Trudgill 1998²: 30) In other words, most of our speakers would qualify in dialectology as typical NORMs (see Chambers and Trudgill 1998²: 29), that is non-mobile old rural male speakers with little education Although this restricts the range

of investigations that can be conducted with the help of FRED in

sociolinguistic terms, it represents exactly the same bias as in earlier dialectological work, where we find a preponderance of NORM speakers as

well, so that results from work on FRED will be comparable to earlier

studies or to material from earlier investigations

2.4 Advantages and disadvantages of orthographic transcripts

FRED is transcribed orthographically, as are most computerized corpora A

number of factors – besides a simple realistic evaluation of our resources – had made it clear from the beginning of the project that orthographically transcribing the dialect material would be the only viable (short-term) procedure First, we had been granted only a restricted amount of time (and funding) to complete the compilation and transcription of the corpus, and there has to be a natural trade-off between the detail of a transcription (depth) and the coverage (breadth) Our aim was a large corpus that would cover a number of dialect regions, and so we had to trade in phonetic detail Moreover, since our explicit focus was on morphosyntactic variability, for all relevant features of dialect grammar that we expected to investigate and that are discussed in the dialectological literature, a phonetic or phonemic transcription would not only have been unnecessary, but even counterproductive in many cases For example, one major drawback of a non-orthographic transcript concerns comparability A non-orthographic transcript would dramatically hamper the feasibility of searching for all

tokens of a certain type (for instance be, personal pronouns, and so on), as

the researcher would have no clue which forms to look for without knowing which realisations actually occur in a given interview (or even across all interviews) As a result, one would have to return to the procedure that was common in corpus linguistics before the advent of computers: reading through the texts and marking all forms of interest in the process – certainly not an ideal situation Finally, only an orthographic transcription of the data met the other requirements of our corpus: the finished corpus was intended to be machine-readable, enabling easy access,

a variety of searches with various tools, and, most importantly, comparability with other corpora/projects

As has been mentioned above, research ties between the Freiburg team and similar projects had been established Since most of these projects were working with orthographic transcripts, this lent additional support to the

decision to use orthographic transcription for FRED Moreover

orthographic transcription would allow us to compare our data with older collections and enable us to make comparisons between different speakers,

different dialects, different dialect areas, and different corpora A further advantage of orthographic transcription is the concentration on real (morphosyntactic) dialect features, as phonetically exceptional forms do not distract the analyst’s eye from the task at hand

All transcription conventions have of course been documented Thus in many cases phonetic peculiarities may be traced from the transcription and the additional databases alone without having to return to the sound files

An alignment of sound and transcripts is planned for the near future

2.5 FRED – corpus design and area coverage

2.5.1 Word counts and areal distribution

FRED consists of 370 texts, which total roughly 2.5 million words of text or

about 300 hours of speech, excluding all interviewer utterances (see Table 1)

The FRED material is broadly subdivided to cover nine major dialect areas,

following Trudgill’s “modern dialects” division of Great Britain (see Trudgill 1999²: 65)

Table 1 FRED word counts and areal distribution

dialect area size (in thousands of words) % of total

Each dialect area is subdivided into different counties A detailed breakdown of counties can be found on the project website (http://www.anglistik.uni-freiburg.de/institut/lskortmann/FRED/)

2.5.2 Speakers

FRED contains data from 420 different speakers (excluding interviewers):

268 (63.8 per cent) are male, and 127 (30.2 per cent) are female (gender is

unknown for the rest) In all, 77.2 per cent of the textual material in FRED

is produced by male speakers, and 21.4 per cent by female speakers

The age of speakers included in FRED ranges from six years to 102

years, with a mean age of 75.2 years A breakdown of age groups, according to the amount of text produced by them, is given in Table 2 As

can be seen, about three quarters of the textual material in FRED is

produced by speakers older than 60 years

Table 2 FRED – speakers’ ages

age group number of speakers % of textual material in

The oldest of FRED’s speakers was born in 1877 Overall, 14 speakers (3.3

per cent) were born between 1880 and 1889, 60 speakers (14.3 per cent) were born between 1890 and 1899, 96 speakers (22.9 per cent) were born between 1900 and 1909, and 64 speakers (15.2 per cent) were born between

1910 and 1919 This means that 89 per cent of all speakers in FRED were

born before 1920

2.5.3 Recordings

The material included in FRED was recorded between 1968 and 1999 A

detailed breakdown of recording dates can be found in Table 3 Over two thirds of all interviews were thus conducted in the 1970s and 1980s, guaranteeing comparability with much dialectological work conducted at that time

Table 3 FRED – interview recording dates

recording date number of speakers % of all speakers

3 Linguistic consequences of using oral history material

The decision to base the FRED corpus predominantly on sources of oral

history projects has had a range of linguistic consequences, some of them foreseen, others not predictable at the outset Perhaps the most clearly predictable linguistic consequences stem from the fact that oral history material necessarily involves the speaker talking about his or her life story

at great length – very often, in fact, the speakers are actively encouraged to talk almost exclusively about their past In the realm of tense and aspect, a predominance of past time narratives implies a predominance of past tense contexts (although not infrequently, of course, stretches of past time narratives are narrated in the historical present tense as well) This is an advantage for studies concentrating on past tense paradigms (for example Anderwald in progress), but a clear disadvantage for any investigation into the present tense, as the data typically yields too few examples to make a regional comparison reliable (see Anderwald 2004) It also means that any

features that are linked to the present tense domain can be expected (and

indeed shown) to be underrepresented: for example use of the (present) progressive vs the simple form; forms for the “recent past” (for example the “after”-perfect in Hiberno-English); uses, if any, of a habitual present and so on

A second feature one would expect, considering the fact that FRED

speakers tend to tell their own life stories, is a skewing in pronoun frequencies Based on the monologic nature of many of the interviews in

FRED, we might expect first person singular and first person plural

contexts to be over-represented However, a comparison with the more

balanced demographic part of the British National Corpus (BNC) that

records everyday spontaneous conversations reveals that this is not the case (see Table 4)

Table 4 Personal pronouns in FRED and the BNC

Despite the impression one gets when reading through FRED transcripts,

first person contexts are not over-represented in the corpus, but account for

roughly one third of all personal pronoun contexts in both FRED and the spoken part of the BNC Although there are slight deviations in frequencies

for individual third person contexts (which can easily be explained on the basis of the nature of the recording situations), the overall frequency of first versus third person contexts is surprisingly similar at 33.8 per cent versus

45.5 per cent in FRED and 36.2 per cent versus 40.6 per cent in the BNC

(spoken) Based on these figures, we expect that comparative analyses of

FRED and other corpora of spoken English involving the category person

will produce representative results

Finally, in the realm of discourse, it has to be stressed that FRED does

not contain genuinely spontaneous, everyday conversations, as for example

the BNC does In the worst case, some (but fortunately only a tiny minority

of) speakers actually read from prepared notes, as witnessed by pages rustling in the background and distinctive pauses where pages are turned Although this worst case is mercifully rare, many interviews are

nevertheless monologic – understandably, the interviewers tried to keep in

the background most of the time FRED for this reason would probably not

lend itself well to the investigation of discourse strategies However, this

limitation is probably not specific to FRED, but applies to dialectological

and sociolinguistic interviews alike, as the main objective is always to record the speakers’ speech, rather than one’s own (see Feagin 2002)

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 The former include those by Herrmann, Pietsch and Wagner, which are presented in revised and shortened versions in the present volume In all these studies the focus has been on high-frequency

morphosyntactic phenomena 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 of dialect morphosyntax applying established corpus-linguistic techniques

Comparisons across the whole FRED material have not been possible

for very long yet, so most truly comparative projects by members of the Freiburg research team are currently still work in progress These include cross-dialectal comparisons of multiple negation (Anderwald to appear 2005), past tense paradigms (Anderwald in progress), pronoun systems (Hernández in progress), complementation patterns (Kolbe in progress), and for several areas of dialect morphosyntax the phenomenon of priming (Szmrecsanyi 2004 and 2005) In addition, a whole range of Masters theses have been completed or are currently under way on the basis of material

from FRED For further information on FRED, the Freiburg project and

future perspectives of (English) dialect syntax, especially from a typological perspective, compare Kortmann 2002, 2003, 2004; Anderwald and Wagner 2005

Notes

1 During the funding period (2000-2005) of Project KO 1181/1-1,2,3 a dozen Masters theses and four Ph.D theses were completed Two doctoral theses,

two postdoctoral theses and several Masters theses based on FRED are well

under way A selection of studies which has grown out of this project is given

in the references (marked with a superscript * preceding the publication year)

For further information on the Freiburg project and FRED, please consult:

http://www.anglistik.uni-freiburg.de/ institut/lskortmann/index.html

2 “There are some points to cover in every interview: date and place of birth, what their parents’ and their own main jobs were And whatever the topic, it usually helps to get the interviewee talking if you begin with their earlier life: family background, grandparents, parents and brothers and sisters (including topics such as discipline), then onto childhood home (housework, chores, mealtimes), leisure (street games, gangs, sport, clubs, books, weekends, holidays, festivals), politics and religion, schooling (key teachers, friends, favourite subjects), early relationships, working life (first job, a typical working day, promotion, pranks and initiation, trade unions and professional organisations), and finally later family life (marriage, divorce, children, homes, money, neighbours, social life, hopes) Most people find it easier to remember their life in chronological order, and it can sometimes take you two

or three sessions to record a full life story.” (‘Preparing questions’ from http://www.oralhistory.org.uk/advice/)

3 The advantages and disadvantages of using oral history material for linguistic studies will be discussed in detail in section 3

4 ‘How to do ORAL HISTORY – After the interview’ at history.org.uk/advice/

http://www.oral-5 However, this procedure also raises the unfortunate problem of copyright Especially for our older material, where many of the speakers have already passed away, it is near impossible to gain copyright clearance Museums and archives are also often reluctant to provide copyright clearance, so that in the

foreseeable future FRED will only be accessible to academic researchers, and

cannot be published in its present form

6 ‘How to do ORAL HISTORY – After the interview’ at history.org.uk/advice/

http://www.oral-7 The tags used in FRED include pauses, different types of non-verbal

elements, truncations, editorial corrections, dubious items, uncertain transcriptions, gaps in transcription

* Asterisks indicate publications or work-in-progress by members of the Freiburg research team on the grammar of British English dialects

Anderwald, Lieselotte

*2002a Negation in Non-Standard British English: Gaps, Regularizations,

Asymmetries (Studies in Germanic Linguistics) London/New York:

Routledge

*2002b *I amn’t sure – Why is there no negative contracted form of first

person singular be? In Anglistentag 2001 Vienna: Proceedings,

Dieter Kastovsky, Gunther Kaltenböck, and Susanne Reichl (eds.), 7–17 Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag

*2003 Non-standard English and typological principles: The case of

negation In Determinants of Linguistic Variation, Günter

Rohden-burg, and Britta Mondorf (eds.), 507–529 Berlin/New York: ton de Gruyter

Mou-*2004 Local markedness as a heuristic tool in dialectology: The case of

amn’t In Dialectology Meets Typology, Bernd Kortmann (ed.), 47–

67 Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter

*2005 Unexpected regional distributions: Multiple negation in FRED In

Aspects of Negation, Yoko Iyeiri (ed.) Tokyo: Yushodo Press

*in progress Naturalness and dialect grammar: Evidence from non-standard past

tense paradigms Post-doctoral dissertation (Habilitationsschrift) English Department, University of Freiburg

Anderwald, Lieselotte, and Bernd Kortmann

*2002 Typology and dialectology: A programmatic sketch In Present-day

Dialectology Problems and Findings, Jaap van Marle, and Jan

Berns (eds.), 159–171 Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter

Anderwald, Lieselotte, and Susanne Wagner

*forthc The Freiburg English Dialect Corpus (FRED) – Applying

Corpus-Linguistic Research Tools to the Analysis of Dialect Data In Using

Unconventional Digital Language Corpora Vol I: Synchronic Corpora, Joan Beal, Karen Corrigan and Herman Moisl (eds.)

Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan

Barbiers, Sjef, Leonie Cornips, and Susanne van der Kleij (eds.)

(http://www.meertens.knaw.nl/projecten/sand/ synmic)

Black, James R., and Virginia Motapanyane (eds.)

1996 Microparametric Syntax and Dialect Variation

Amsterdam/Phila-delphia: Benjamins

Bremann, Rolf

1984 Soziolinguistische Untersuchung zum Englisch von Cornwall.

Frankfurt: Lang

Bresnan, Joan, and Ashwini Deo

2001 Grammatical constraints on variation: ‘Be’ in the Survey of English

Dialects and (Stochastic) Optimality Theory Unpublished script http://www-lfg.stanford.edu/bresnan/download.html

manu-Chambers, Jack K

2004 Dynamic typology and vernacular universals In Dialectology Meets

Typology, Bernd Kortmann (ed.), 127–145 Berlin/New York:

Mou-ton de Gruyter

Chambers, Jack K., and Peter Trudgill

1998² Dialectology Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Feagin, Crawford

2002 Entering the community: Fieldwork In The Handbook of Language

Variation and Change, Jack K Chambers, Peter Trudgill, and

Nata-lie Schilling-Estes (eds.), 20–39 Oxford/New York: Blackwell Fischer, Andreas

1976 Dialects in the South-West of England: A Lexical Investigation.

Bern: Francke

Hernández, Nuria

*in progress Pronouns in dialects of English: A corpus-based study of

non-standard phenomena Ph.D thesis English Department, University

Kastovsky, Dieter, Gunther Kaltenböck, and Susanne Reichl (eds.)

2002 Anglistentag 2001 Vienna: Proceedings Trier: Wissenschaftlicher

Verlag

Klemola, Juhani

2002 Continuity and change in dialect morphosyntax In Anglistentag

2001 Vienna: Proceedings, Dieter Kastovsky, Gunther Kaltenböck,

and Susanne Reichl (eds.), 47–56 Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Kolbe, Daniela

*in progress Complementation patterns in English dialects Ph.D thesis English

Department, University of Freiburg

Kortmann, Bernd

*1999 Typology and dialectology In Proceedings of the 16th International

Congress of Linguists, Paris 1997, Bernard Caron (ed.) CD-ROM

Amsterdam: Elsevier Science

*2002 New prospects for the study of dialect syntax: Impetus from

syntactic theory and language typology In Syntactic

Microvariation, Sjef Barbiers, Leonie Cornips, and Susanne van der

Kleij (eds.), 185–213 Amsterdam: SAND

*2003 Comparative English dialect grammar: A typological approach In

Fifty Years of English Studies in Spain (1952:2002) A Commemorative Volume, Ignacio M Palacios Martinez, María José

López Couso, Patricia Fra, and Elena Seoane (eds.), 65–83.Santiago de Compostela: University of Santiago

Kortmann, Bernd (ed.)

2004 Dialectology Meets Typology Dialect Grammar from a

Cross-Linguistic Perspective Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter

Mair, Christian

2002 Three changing patterns of verb complementation in Late Modern

English: A real-time study based on matching text corpora English

Language and Linguistics 6: 105–131

Mair, Christian, Marianne Hundt, Geoffrey Leech, and Nicholas Smith

2002 Short-term diachronic shifts in part-of-speech frequencies: a

comparison of the tagged LOB and F-LOB corpora International

Journal of Corpus Linguistics 7: 245–264

Montgomery, Michael

1994 The evolution of verb concord in Scots In Studies in Scots and

Gaelic: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on the Languages of Scotland, Alexander Fenton, and Donald A Mac-

Donald (eds.), 81–95 Edinburgh: Canongate Academic

Orton, Harold

1962 Survey of English Dialects – Introduction Leeds: Arnold

Orton, Harold, Michael V Barry, Eugen Dieth, Wilfrid J Halliday, Philip M

Tilling, and Martyn F Wakelin (eds.)

1962–71 Survey of English Dialects Leeds: Arnold

2002 Animate pronouns for inanimate objects: pronominal gender in

English regional varieties In Anglistentag 2001 Vienna:

Procee-dings, Dieter Kastovsky, Gunther Kaltenböck, and Susanne Reichl

(eds.), 19–34 Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag

Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt

*2004 Persistence phenomena in the grammar of spoken English Ph.D

thesis English Department, University of Freiburg

*2005 Creatures of habit: A corpus-linguistic analysis of persistence in

spoken English Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 1: 113–

149

Tristram, Hildegard L C

1997 DO-periphrasis in contact? In Language in Time and Space,

Heinrich Ramisch, and Kenneth Wynne (eds.), 401–417 Stuttgart: Steiner

1983 Non-standard periphrastic do in the dialects of South West Britain

Love and Language 3: 56–74

Williams, Ann, and Paul Kerswill

1999 Dialect levelling: Change and continuity in Milton Keynes, Reading

and Hull In Urban Voices: Accent Studies in the British Isles, Paul

Foulkes, and Gerald Docherty (eds.), 141–162 London: Edward Arnold

and other nonstandard relative constructions (nonreduction; ‘connector’ which).

1 Introduction

This study is concerned with prototypical relative clauses, i.e adnominal relative clauses A relative clause is a subordinate clause that modifies an antecedent with which a relative marker in the relative clause is coreferential An adnominal relative clause forms part of a constituent of the matrix clause, as in the examples in (1) below In these examples, as throughout this chapter, the following notational conventions are used: The relative clause is put in square brackets and the antecedent is marked in boldface The zero relative marker is indicated by the symbol ‡ The initial three capital letters indicate the region from which the dialect data originate: CMI = Central Midlands, CNO = Central North, CSW = Central Southwest, EAN = East Anglia, NIR = Northern Ireland, SCO = Scotland (cf Kortmann and Wagner, this volume: Trudgill’s [1999] 2003 Map 18:

‘Modern Dialect areas’) This information on the source region is followed

by the text code, the speaker’s identification code (where available), and

(for the BNC texts) the sentence number (see section 2):

pony [‡ I had] (EAN-K65<S: 0806>)

b this Billy [that used to go round all the district] and, and

[buy up all these old cast horses] and [bring them up there] (SCO-GYS<Person: PSSCO6><S: 136>)

c they used to perhaps have competitions for the childrens

[what used to want to go on] (CMI-FYD<S: 303>)

Adnominal relative clauses are a central syntactic phenomenon in every dialect, taking however different forms in different dialects Although adnominal relative clauses have been a fair center of interest in theoretical linguistics, including some works on individual dialects, a cross-dialectal study within a typological framework has never been undertaken This framework apart, all formation strategies of adnominal relative clauses investigated in this chapter will be subjected to a cross-dialectal analysis with the aim of identifying salient properties that individual dialects have in common, and those properties in which they differ from one another and from the standard variety

In a comparative study, it can be determined which standard features have made inroads into traditional dialects, and to what extent (e.g whether

there is a predominance of wh-pronouns) On the other hand, dialects also

converge toward one another in a process of dialect levelling General nonstandard features of informal speech have developed or are developing

from traditional dialect features (e.g the nonstandard relative marker what)

and may in turn affect the future shape of Standard English A comparative view can identify these supra-regional features of informal speech, thus allowing some prognosis as to their future development and whether they might find entry into Standard English

2 Data

The material used for the present investigation constitutes largely a

subcorpus of the Freiburg English Dialect Corpus (FRED; cf Kortmann

and Wagner, this volume) The data are taken from six areas (East Anglia,

the Central Southwest, the Central Midlands, the Central North, Scotland, and Northern Ireland) and from several sources:

dialectal texts extracted from the British National Corpus (BNC),

published in 1995 They were reformatted into easy-to-read texts, while selective tags were kept The texts result from oral history projects and are based on recorded interviews with elderly, working-class people speaking naturally The East Anglian data were recorded in Suffolk and Eastern Cambridgeshire, the Central Midlands data in Nottinghamshire, and the Scotland data in Midlothian, Ayrshire, Selkirkshire, Lanarkshire, and Invernesshire

Rural Life Museum data (texts SRLM 105, SRLM 107, SRLM 108,

are taken from the FRED Corpus

All Central Southwest data originate from Eastern Somerset The Cumbrian data were recorded in the pre-1974 counties Westmorland, Cumberland, and Lancashire, in particular in the Ambleside area, formerly Westmorland

with elderly informants (age group 3) were considered The Northern Ireland data were recorded in Antrim, Londonderry, Tyrone, Fermanagh, Armagh, and Down

The dialect corpus analyzed in this chapter totals approximately 480,000 words, divided into some 80,000 words for each of the six ‘dialect’ regions The word ‘dialect’ here should be taken with a grain of salt, as it is rather a convenient means to partition the map than any claim to the existence and location of firm dialect boundaries The reason why these regions were chosen was that they cover the British map areally, that means, they are areas which are sufficiently wide apart geographically and have an identity

of their own For the sake of convenience, the regional speech used in these areas is referred to as ‘dialect’ Each region is named after a larger geographical area, largely following Map 18 ‘Modern Dialect areas’ published in Trudgill (2003)

The six regional corpora are not equally dialectal As a whole, the Central Southwest, the Central North, and the Northern Ireland data represent broader dialectal speech than do the data from the East Anglian, Central Midland, and Scottish subcorpora In fact, the Central Southwest and the Northern Ireland corpora exclusively consist of data by broad speakers, while the composition of speakers of the other four corpora is more heterogeneous

3 Overall distribution of relative clauses and relative markers

Table 1 presents the overall frequencies of adnominal relative markers in the six investigated regions (Central Southwest, East Anglia, Central Midlands, Central North, Scotland; Northern Ireland) Absolute numbers are typed in boldface; percentages are given in square brackets A look at the totals of relative markers across the six regions reveals that the total of

occurrences (1874) with relative particles (zero, that, what; as) outnumbers the total of occurrences (638) with relative pronouns (who, which, whom;

whose) by almost 3:1 The most frequent relative marker in the corpus is that (39%), followed by zero (28.1%), which (15.1%), who (10.1%),

nonstandard what (6.8%), and as (0.8%) The case-marked wh-pronouns

whom (0.2%) and whose (0.1%) are very unusual in dialectal speech

The regional differences in relative marker distribution are indicated by the order and the font size in Map 1, which is based on Trudgill’s (2003) Map 18 ‘Modern Dialect areas’, supplemented by a map of Ireland and

Northern Scotland Leaving wh-pronouns as a standard and supra-regional

feature aside for the moment, Figure 1 presents the percentages of relative markers when moving from north to south

Table 1 Areal distribution of relative markers

CSW EAN CMI CNO SCO NIR TOTAL

ingham-shire)

(Nott-bria:

(Cum-land, West-morland, NorthernLanca-shire)

Cumber-(Lothian, Borders, Strath-clyde,Inver-nesshire)

Map 1 Areal distribution of relative markers

zero that what as

North Northern Ireland: 46.9% 50.1% - 0.5%

Scotland: 23.6% 46.2% 0.4% - Central North: 34% 43.5% 2.4% 1.4% Central Midlands: 17.7% 40.3% 5.8% 2.4% East Anglia: 20.4% 22% 15.9% -South Central Southwest: 28.9% 26.5% 22.3% -

Figure 1 Distribution of relative markers along the North-South axis in

percentages

The Central Southwest data show rather even frequencies of zero (28.9%),

that (26.5%), and what (22.3%) East Anglia presents a similar picture: that

(22%), zero (20.4%), and what (15.9%) are quite evenly distributed As we move northward, that steadily gains strength In the Central Midlands, that

(40.3%) is the predominant relative marker, at the expense of zero (17.7%)

and what (5.8%), which both have less importance (in absolute numbers and percentages) when compared to the southern areas What is more than twice as strong as the relative particle as (2.4%), which is not found in the

south and is, percentage-wise, weak in the Central Midlands In the Central

North, that accounts for 43.5%, although zero (34%) is also prominent

What (2.4%) and as (1.4%) have about halved their percentages in

comparison to the Central Midlands Scotland is even more clearly

dominated by that (46.2%) Zero (23.6%) is a much weaker second; what

(0.4%) is almost nonexistent (one clear case in Glasgow and one dubious

instance), and as is absent Finally, in Northern Ireland, that (50.1%) is

used in about half of all instances The other half is almost taken up by zero

(46.9%) While what is unknown, as (0.5%) is hovering around half a per

cent

With particular regard to the dialectal variants what and as, what is by

far the stronger one, the more so the farther south we go In the south (East

Anglia; Central Southwest), what has a substantial number of instances,

whereas in the north (Central North; Scotland), it plays a marginal role; in

Northern Ireland what plays no role at all

As has its stronghold in the Central Midlands It is used, though not

often, in the Central North and in one county (Tyrone) of Northern Ireland

According to the present data, what has its strongest position in the Central

Southwest

All existing wh-pronouns have found their way into the investigated

dialects However, depending on the dialectal broadness of the individual subcorpus, their proportion varies from 2.4% in the very broad Northern Ireland subcorpus to 41.7% in the East Anglian subcorpus, which, as a whole, is closest to the standard variety In other words, the composition of speakers and the dialectal quality of the data of the corpora are reflected in

the frequency of wh-pronouns In between, there are the broad subcorpora from the Central North (18.7% wh-pronouns) and the Central Southwest (22.3% wh-pronouns) and the less broad subcorpora from Scotland (29.9%

wh-pronouns) and the Central Midlands (33.8% wh-pronouns) In addition

to the overall percentage of wh-pronouns, the presence or absence of marked wh-forms is also indicative of how standardized or how dialectal (i.e broad) a subcorpus is: whom (two instances in Scotland; two in the Central Midlands) and whose (three in the Central Midlands) only appear in two of the three less broad subcorpora Thus, the frequency of wh-pronouns

case-serves as a yardstick for the degree of standardization or traditionality of speech, respectively While traditional dialect only comprises relative

particles, (written) Standard English abounds in wh-pronouns, which are indeed a typical trait of Standard English Thus, the more wh-pronouns,

particularly of the case-marked variant, a corpus of dialect data contains, the closer this corpus is to the standard variety and the further away from traditional dialect

4 Previous investigations of relative markers

4.1 Supra-regional studies and/or national surveys

Before giving a summary of earlier works on the six dialect regions in section 4.2, it is in this section that more detailed information will be given

on the three supra-regional and national surveys conducted for the dialects

of England in the late 19th and, roughly, first half of the 20th century

4.1.1 Wright’s English Dialect Grammar

In Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Grammar ([1905] 1961), the relative marker what is said to occur “in some of the north-midland counties and in nearly all the counties south of the north midlands” (Wright 1961: 77) As

is “occasionally used” (Wright 1961: 77) in Westmorland and generally

used in Nottinghamshire, East Anglia, and East Somerset, while at is

generally used in Scotland and Ireland The zero relative marker is a

recurrent phenomenon in dialect – also in subject position – whereas whom

is never employed (cf Wright 1961: 77)

Map 2 Map 207 31.1: (a man) that’s poor (Lowman Survey)

4.1.2 Lowman Survey

The Lowman Survey of Middle and South England was carried out in

1937/38 and supplemented by data from Henry E Collins for the Southeast

in 1950 For the Central Southwest, Map 207 and 208, which are published

in Viereck’s (1975) atlas, yield the following results: Map 207, featuring

question 31.1: a man) that’s poor (i.e linguistic environment: restrictive

relative clause; subject position; personal, indefinite antecedent), displays

as in all counties except for Dorset, where the relative marker is that Map

208 (cf next page) gives a similar picture It reproduces question 31.2: he’s

a boy) whose father, which asks for a genitive relative marker It turns out

that the periphrastic genitive as his father is used in all counties except for

Map 3 Map 208 31.2: (he’s a boy) whose father (Lowman Survey)

In East Anglia the survey investigated four localities in Suffolk, three in Cambridgeshire, (and three localities in Norfolk and three in Essex) Map

207 shows nearly an even distribution of what (two in Suffolk; two in Norfolk; one in Northern Essex) and that (two in Suffolk; two in

Cambridgeshire; one in Norfolk; two in Southern Essex) (cf also Viereck

1980: 27) Map 208 yields similar findings: Periphrastic what his father (two in Suffolk) and that his father (one in Western Cambridgeshire; two in