Overview

Despite the advances of radio and television and increasing mobility and urbanization, spoken English is by no means becoming more like the written standard. English dialect grammar, however, is still a new and relatively undeveloped area of research, and most studies to date are either restricted regionally, or based on impressionistic statements. This book provides the first thorough empirical study of the field of non-standard negation across Great Britain. Based on the British National Corpus, this book investigates a range of morphosyntactic features of negation that can be found in everyday spoken language. Employing the relatively new method of investigating dialect grammar with the help of r rge corpora, it provides in-depth analyses of contradiction types, mulitple negation, ain't , third-person don't , and wasn't/weren't This book also utilizes a new theoretical frame: the framework of functional typology. Linking variation in one language with variation between languages in this way provides a powerful instrument for the interpretation of dialect data. A comparison of non-standard patterns with cross-linguistics trends and regularities suggests functional explanations that account for the fact that non-standard forms are still spreading, despite the growing influence of the standard variety. The data discussed in this book offers a new understanding of regional and social variation in British English. The research is relevant for both the construction of a functional theory of language within typology, and the description of individual varieties of languages in dialectology. As such, it will be of essential interest to academics and researchers in the fields of sociolinguistics, syntax and morphology, corpus linguists, typology, dialectology and English linguistics.

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9780415258746

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Lieselotte Anderwald

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