Dialects of English

Studies in Grammatical Variation

Peter Trudgill, J. K. Chambers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315505435
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Linguistique

This collection consists of 15 articles by an international group of linguists and 7 essays by the editors, tackling a broad range of issues and representing some of the most authoritative work in English dialect grammar.Individual chapters cover the full international range of English dialects, from the centre of Sydney to the shores of Newfoundland, and from the Scottish borders to the Appalachian Mountains. Soundly based on empirical research, they are rich in data of great interest in itself, but no article is merely descriptive. The editors have selected papers for their value in contributing to the reader's broader understanding of the theoretical issues concerning dialectology as a whole. As a result, dialectology is presented as a major scholarly discipline drawing creatively on such areas as linguistics, sociology, psychology, history, geography and even philosophy. These and other themes are explored in a wide-ranging Introduction by the editors, which sets the individual pieces and the subject in context for the reader.

Chapter 1
Introduction: English dialect grammar

Peter Trudgill and J. K. Chambers

In recent years there has been a move, as far as interest in dialects of English is concerned, from a concern with purely phonological, lexical and historical issues towards a deeper interest in the grammar of different English varieties. This is especially true of syntax, which has traditionally received much less attention from dialectologists than morphology. This upsurge of interest has been particularly noticeable, in the 1980s, in the British Isles. North American linguists have for two decades or so been studying the syntax of non-standard varieties, particularly those spoken by Black Americans, but in Britain the increase in involvement with grammatical issues has been much more recent. Indeed, as the contents of this book show, much of the best work on English dialect grammar in Britain has been carried out by scholars who are not British: five of the chapters in this volume that include data from England have been written by linguists from overseas (Gachelin, Houston, Ihalainen, Paddock).

The publication of this collection of papers reflects this increase in interest, and of course would not have been possible without the recent increase in scholarly activity in this field: four of the fifteen papers here are from the 1970s and nine of them from the 1980s. Our aim with this book is therefore to make available to a wider audience a selection of what we believe to be the most important, exciting and interesting papers in the area of English dialect grammar. The data presented here are in themselves fascinating in their diversity, and of interest to anyone who has a concern for varieties of English.

It is also our hope, however, that our demonstration of the availability in English dialects of grammatical devices, categories and distinctions which many an English-speaking linguist would associate only with, to them, more exotic languages will have one other rather specific effect. We would like grammarians of English to realize that by concentrating, as most of them do, on their own native standard or other mainstream (see below) varieties of English, they are missing out on some intriguing problems and important data, and that they are thereby doing both theoretical linguistics and descriptive English linguistics a disservice.

The papers published in this volume have been selected because they combine descriptively interesting and, from the point of view of English as a whole, often unusual data with discussions of important theoretical linguistic, historical linguistic and socio-linguistic problems.

A majority of the papers deal with data from what we can call, following Wells (1982) and others, traditional dialects. We take it that English speakers who normally employ forms such as:

We're not coming.
We aren't coming.
We ain't comin.

are speakers of mainstream English dialects. Speakers who, on the other hand, say:

Us byun't a-comin.

are speakers of traditional dialect. The same point can be made from phonology. Pronunciations of words such as bone as [boun], bɔun], [bæun], [boːn] are typical of mainstream varieties. Traditional dialect pronunciations of the same word would include [bɪən], [beːn], [bwʊn].

The vast majority of native English speakers around the world differ linguistically from one another relatively little, with more differentiation in their phonetics and phonology than at other linguistic levels. Most English people, for example, betray their geographical origins much more through their accents than through their vocabulary or grammar. This vast majority speaks mainstream varieties of English, standard and non-standard, which resemble one another quite closely, and which are all reasonably readily mutually intelligible. Differences between these mainstream varieties may be regionally and socially very diagnostic, but they are generally linguistically rather trivial, and where not trivial, quite regular and predictable. Grammatically, in particular, these varieties are very close to Standard English. We associate mainstream dialects with upper-and middle-class speakers throughout the English-speaking world; with areas out of which Standard English as a social dialect grew historically, ie the south-east of England; with most urban areas; with areas which have shifted to English only relatively recently, such as the Scottish Highlands and western Wales; and with recently settled mixed colonial dialect-speaking areas, such as most of North America and Australia.

Traditional dialects, on the other hand, are spoken by a (probably shrinking) minority of the English-speaking population. These dialects differ very considerably from Standard English, from other mainstream varieties and from each other. They also differ in unsystematic and unpredictable ways, and in their grammar as well as in phonology and lexis. Some of them may not be readily intelligible to speakers of other dialects. And they are to be found only in long-settled and, especially, remote and peripheral rural areas, although some urban dialects in northern Britain should also be included under the heading of traditional dialect.

Traditional dialects are of particular interest to us here precisely because they do diverge most markedly at the grammatical level from the already relatively well-known standard and other mainstream varieties of English. It is true that we do include in this book a number of chapters based on data from non-standard mainstream varieties, such as those by Cheshire on Reading, England, and Eisikovits on Sydney, Australia. But a majority of the chapters in this volume deal with the less well-known traditional dialects, which is why the geographical emphasis of the book is on geographically peripheral areas of Britain, such as Scotland and the south-west of England, and on the long-settled and remoter areas of North America, such as Newfoundland and the Appalachian Mountains.

We have not included material in this book on the grammar of those other varieties of English which differ markedly from the mainstream varieties, namely English-based Creoles and varieties with creole ancestry. Many of these have already received much greater coverage from linguists than the traditional dialects, and could in any case easily fill several volumes by themselves.

It is of linguistic interest to note that a majority of the papers that we have found to qualify for inclusion in the book on the grounds of quality and theoretical and descriptive importance have to do with English dialect verbal systems. Our first section, however, is devoted to pronouns.

Part one

Pronouns

Chapter 2
Pronouns and pronominal systems in English dialects

Peter Trudgill and J. K. Chambers

English dialects demonstrate a considerable amount of variation in their pronominal systems, in form, function and usage. The pronominal system which is common to all varieties of Standard English around the world can be presented as follows:

I	me	my	mine	myself
you	you	your	yours	yourself
he	him	his	his	himself
she	her	her	hers	herself
it	it	its	itself
we	us	our	ours	ourselves
you	you	your	yours	yourselves
they	them	their	theirs	themselves

Differences from this system in the mainstream non-standard and traditional dialects include the following:

1. Possessive me:
   I've lost me bike.
   This is very common in many parts of Britain, and occurs even in colloquial Standard English speech.
2. Singular us:
   Give us a kiss.
   This too is common in colloquial Standard English speech in certain locutions, such as the above. In certain regions, however, notably the north-east of England, us has a much wider function as singular object pronoun:
   He hit us in the face.
3. Possessive us:
   This is common in many dialects in areas of the north of England:
   We like us town.
4. Second person singular thou, thee:
   I'll let thee have some. Many traditional dialects in the north and west of England retain forms descended from thou and thee as second person singular pronouns addressed to friends and intimates. In some cases distinct second person singular verb forms are retained also. In these dialects, you functions as the second person singular formal and plural pronoun (see Chapter 9).
5. Singular you:
   In many dialects of English around the world, the historical loss of the second person singular/plural distinction that went with the loss of thou/thee has been repaired by the introduction of new second person plural pronouns, such as youse, which is found in North America, Australia, Scotland, England and especially Ireland. The American South, as is well known, has y'all, and, less widely and less well known, you 'uns. The traditional dialects of East Anglia, England, have you . . . together, in this function:
   Come you on together.
   In these dialects, you is singular only.
6. Third person that:
   That's raining.
   I don't like it – that's no good.
   In East Anglian dialects of English, it occurs only as an object pronoun, with third-person neuter singular subjects being indicated by that:
7. Possessives in -n:
   In the traditional dialects of central England, as well as in some parts of North America, the so-called second possessives have a regular system in which all forms end in -n:
   That's mine That's ourn
   That's yourn That's theirn
   That's hisn
   That's hern.
8. eflexive hiss elf, theirs elves:
   He hurt hisself.
   Many non-standard dialects of English have a regularized system of reflexive pronouns in which all forms are based on the possessive pronouns + self/selves:
   myself ourselves
   yourself yourselves
   hisself theirselves
   herself

It is perhaps, however, the traditional dialects of the south-west of England, and their descendants in Newfoundland, which differ most strikingly from the pronoun system outlined above. The pronominal systems of these dialects are dealt with in this book by Paddock in Chapter 5 and by Ihalainen in Chapter 9.

There are two major characteristics to note. The first is what Ihalainen (p. 106) calls 'pronoun exchange'. This refers to the fact that pronouns that are nominative in mainstream dialects can function as objects, and vice versa, in the south-west of England.¹ We are not yet entirely sure how this operates, but it is perhaps at leas...