Full Description
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.
Contents
SourcesMapsAcknowledgements1. English dialect grammar2. Pronouns and pronominal systems in English dialects3. The personal dative in Appalachian speech, Donna Christian 4. Demonstrative adjectives and pronouns in a Devonshire dialect, Martin Harris 5. The actuation problem for gender change in Wessex versus Newfoundland, Harold Paddock 6. Verb systems in English dialects7. Variation in the use of ain't in an urban English dialect, Jenny Cheshire 8. Double modals in Hawick Scots,Keith Brown 9. On grammatical diffusion in Somerset folk speech, Ossi Ihalainen 10. Variation in the lexical verb in inner-Sydney English, Edina Eisikovits 11. Aspects in English dialects12. Periphrasic do in affirmative sentences in the dialect of East Somerset, Ossi Ihalainen 13. Preverbal done in Alabam and elsewhere, Crawford Feagin 14. Conservatism versus substratal transfer in Irish English, John Harris 15. Non-finite verb forms in English dialects16. Transitivity and intransitivity in the dialects of the south-west of England, Jean-Marc Gachelin 17. Toward a description of a-prefixing in Appalachian English, Walt Wolfram 18. A grammatical continuum for (ing), Ann Houston 19. Adverbials in English dialects 20. Affirmative any more in present-day American English, Walter H.Eitner 21. The boundaries of a grammar - inter-dialectal reactions to positive anymore, William Labov 22. Dialect and grammar - data and theory
