Legacies of syntactic change in a conservative dialect, York, England

Abstract

Several linguistic traditions have yielded important insights into syntactic change: these include historical linguists (e.g. Meillet 1967), historical dialectologists (e.g. Fisiak 1988), theoretically-informed dialect syntax (e.g. Henry 1995), and variationists (e.g. Labov 1969). We advocate an approach that draws strategically from the principles and techniques of these practices in order to refine the method for probing syntactic change, to employ vernacular speech as syntactic data, and to understand syntactic change in terms of structure as well as social and discourse context. We demonstrate how different perspectives provide essential and complementary contributions to understanding linguistic change. We use a case study of a linguistic feature that has been undergoing syntactic change through obsolescence in the variety of English spoken in York, England: the non- standard use of a zero form with singular count nouns (e.g. They used to follow Ø river) which we refer to as a ‘zero definite article’. The path from the emergence of a syntactic feature towards its demise is typically a protracted development. Historical (corpus) linguistics can trace the first attestations of a feature and its earlier meanings, historical dialectology its geographical distribution, and theoretically-informed research on dialect syntax can circumscribe its syntactic structure. We highlight the additional benefit of a variationist sociolinguistics approach, which focusses on community-based samples of spoken vernacular language data and quantitative methods. For example, in this case study we can document the last vestiges of the zero definite article in a conservative dialect and capture grammatical changes in the process of loss by comparing older to younger generations of speakers.