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 language-

internal 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 non-

linguist 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. The man I called _____ was our neighbour. (direct object)

b. *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 non-

standard 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 non-

habitual 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 non-

standard 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 non-

standard 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 English-

speaking 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 non-

standard 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 functional-

typological-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.uni-essen.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 questionnaire-based 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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