Nonstandard periphrastic DO and verbal -s in the south west of England
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Fiona de Both
Abstract
This paper aims to investigate the distribution of periphrastic DO and verbal -s in the south west of England using the FRED-s corpus. The data supports the earlier reported suggestion that the two features are in complementary distribution with regard to region: in counties where one feature is favoured, the other feature is disfavoured and speakers who use one feature tend not to use the other feature. However, there is some overlap as some speakers in the FRED-s corpus use both features, giving support to an idea, earlier proposed, of a transitory area in which a possible change takes place where speakers drop the use of DO and adopt verbal -s. Furthermore, the data shows an interesting tendency where periphrastic DO favours the habitual verbal aspect, whereas verbal -s favours the punctual verbal aspect. These findings could indicate that the two features have a different grammatical function. However, the overall frequency with which these two features occur is very low and seems to suggest that they are disappearing. Moreover, their use seems to be limited to short originally Germanic words, suggesting that the two features only occur in contexts where they were originally used, but are not productive.
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge Dr. Marcelle Cole for her kind support during the process of writing this paper. This article is based on my BA thesis, which was written as part of the BA studies at Utrecht University. Parts of the thesis have been included in full in this article.
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- New speaker paradigm and historical sociolinguistics: Dynamics between Florentines and learners in early modern Italy
- Nonstandard periphrastic DO and verbal -s in the south west of England
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- McEnery, Anthony Helen Baker: Corpus Linguistics and 17th-Century Prostitution. Computational Linguistics and History
- Rutten, Gijsbert Marijke J. van der Wal: Letters as Loot. A Sociolinguistic Approach to Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Dutch (Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 2)
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Articles in the same Issue
- Research Articles
- New speaker paradigm and historical sociolinguistics: Dynamics between Florentines and learners in early modern Italy
- Nonstandard periphrastic DO and verbal -s in the south west of England
- The role of eighteenth-century newspapers in the disappearance of Upper German variants in Austria
- New Denmark, Canada: An exceptional case of language maintenance in a Danish immigrant settlement
- From everyday speech to literary style: The decline of the distant address De in Norwegian during the twentieth century
- Book Reviews
- Säily, Tanja Säily Nurmi, Anja Palander-Collin, Minna Auer, Anita: Exploring Future Paths for Historical Sociolinguistics (Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 7)
- Hickey, Raymond: Listening to the Past. Audio Records of Accents of English (Studies in English Language)
- McEnery, Anthony Helen Baker: Corpus Linguistics and 17th-Century Prostitution. Computational Linguistics and History
- Rutten, Gijsbert Marijke J. van der Wal: Letters as Loot. A Sociolinguistic Approach to Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Dutch (Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 2)
- Palander-Collin, Minna Maura Ratia Irma Taavitsainen: Diachronic Developments in English News Discourse (Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 6)
