Dialects of English Studies in Grammatical Variation

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.

SourcesMapsAcknowledgements1. English dialect grammar2. Pronouns and pronominal systems in English dialects3. The personal dative in Appalachian speech, Donna Christian4. Demonstrative adjectives and pronouns in a Devonshire dialect, Martin Harris5. The actuation problem for gender change in Wessex versus Newfoundland, Harold Paddock6. Verb systems in English dialects7. Variation in the use of "ain't" in an urban English dialect, Jenny Cheshire8. Double modals in Hawick Scots,Keith Brown9. On grammatical diffusion in Somerset folk speech, Ossi Ihalainen10. Variation in the lexical verb in inner-Sydney English, Edina Eisikovits11. Aspects in English dialects12. Periphrasic "do" in affirmative sentences in the dialect of East Somerset, Ossi Ihalainen13. Preverbal "done" in Alabam and elsewhere, Crawford Feagin14. Conservatism versus substratal transfer in Irish English, John Harris15. Non-finite verb forms in English dialects16. Transitivity and intransitivity in the dialects of the south-west of England, Jean-Marc Gachelin17. Toward a description of "a"-prefixing in Appalachian English, Walt Wolfram18. A grammatical continuum for (ing), Ann Houston19. Adverbials in English dialects 20. Affirmative "any more" in present-day American English, Walter H.Eitner21. The boundaries of a grammar - inter-dialectal reactions to positive "anymore", William Labov22. Dialect and grammar - data and theory

J. K. Chambers, Peter Trudgill