1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910819108003321

Titolo

A comparative grammar of British English dialects : agreement, gender, relative clauses / / by Bernd Kortmann ... [et al.]

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Berlin ; ; New York, : Mouton de Gruyter, c2005

ISBN

1-283-39653-X

9786613396532

3-11-019751-0

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (384 p.)

Collana

Topics in English linguistics ; ; 50.1

Classificazione

HF 520

Altri autori (Persone)

KortmannBernd <1960->

Disciplina

427

Soggetti

English language - Agreement

English language - Dialects - Great Britain

English language - Gender

English language - Relative clauses

English language - Great Britain - Grammar

Great Britain Languages

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

The Freiburg English Dialect Project and corpus / Bernd Kortmann, Susanne Wagner -- Relative clauses in English dialects of the British Isles / Tanja Hermann -- "Some do and some doesn't" : verbal concord variation in the north of the British Isles / Lukas Pietsch -- Gender in English pronouns : southwest England / Susanne Wagner

Sommario/riassunto

This volume offers qualitative as well as corpus-based quantitative studies on three domains of grammatical variation in the British Isles. All studies draw heavily on the Freiburg English Dialect Corpus (FRED), a computerized corpus for predominantly British English dialects comprising some 2.5 million words. Besides an account of FRED and the advantages which a functional-typological framework offers for the study of dialect grammar, the volume includes the following three substantial studies. Tanja Herrmann's study is the first systematic cross-regional study of relativization strategies for Scotland, Northern Ireland, and four major dialect areas in England. In her research design Hermann has included a number of issues crucial in typological



research on relative clauses, above all the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy. Lukas Pietsch investigates the so-called Northern Subject Rule, a special agreement phenomenon known from Northern England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. His study is primarily based on the Northern Ireland Transcribed Corpus of Speech, but also on the FRED and SED data (Survey of English Dialects) for the North of England. Susanne Wagner is concerned with the phenomenon of pronominal gender, focussing especially on the typologically rather unique semantic gender system in the dialects of Southwest England. This volume will be of interest to dialectologists, sociolinguists, typologists, historical linguists, grammarians, and anyone interested in the structure of spontaneous spoken English.