This book delves into the grammatical variations across British English dialects, utilizing real speech data gathered from more than thirty counties. It highlights the unique linguistic features and patterns present in different regions, providing insights into the diversity of English as spoken in Britain. The exploration is grounded in authentic examples, making it a valuable resource for linguists and language enthusiasts interested in the nuances of dialectal grammar.
This volume aims to overcome sub-disciplinary boundaries in the study of linguistic variation - be it language-internal or cross-linguistic. Even though dialectologists, register analysts, typologists, and quantitative linguists all deal with linguistic variation, there is astonishingly little interaction across these fields. But the fourteen contributions in this volume show that these subdisciplines actually share many interests and methodological concerns in common. The chapters specifically converge in the following ways: First, they all seek to explore linguistic variation, within or across languages. Second, they are based on usage data, that is, on corpora of (more or less) authentic text or speech of different languages or language varieties. Third, all chapters are concerned with the joint analysis (also sometimes known as “aggregation” or “data synthesis”) of multiple phenomena, features, or measurements of some sort. And lastly, the contributors all marshal quantitative analysis techniques to analyse the data. In short, the volume explores the text-feature-aggregation pipeline in variation studies, demonstrating that there is much mutual inspiration to be had by thinking outside the disciplinary box.
Language users tend to re-use familiar morphosyntactic material, leading to persistent linguistic patterns in discourse. This book presents the first extensive corpus analysis of the factors influencing this persistence, employing regression analyses across various functional, cognitive, psycholinguistic, and external dimensions. It examines case studies such as the use of synthetic versus analytic comparatives, the s-genitive versus the of-genitive, gerundial versus infinitival complementation, particle placement, and future marker selection across diverse spoken English registers and geographical varieties. By offering a probabilistic framework, the work explores how persistence, alongside other factors, shapes linguistic choices. Distinct from traditional studies, it bridges multiple research traditions, combining insights from variationist sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and discourse analysis. The aim is to construct a comprehensive model of linguistic choice-making, contributing to a broader understanding of spoken language dynamics. This research is particularly relevant for graduate students and scholars in variationist sociolinguistics, probabilistic linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics.
