Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of maps
- List of tables
- Preface and acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Data and methods
- 3 The feature catalogue
- 4 Surveying the forest: on aggregate morphosyntactic distances and similarities
- 5 Is morphosyntactic variability gradient? Exploring dialect continua
- 6 Classification: the dialect area scenario
- 7 Back to the features
- 8 Summary and discussion
- 9 Outlook and concluding remarks
- Appendices
- References
- Index
3 - The feature catalogue
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of maps
- List of tables
- Preface and acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Data and methods
- 3 The feature catalogue
- 4 Surveying the forest: on aggregate morphosyntactic distances and similarities
- 5 Is morphosyntactic variability gradient? Exploring dialect continua
- 6 Classification: the dialect area scenario
- 7 Back to the features
- 8 Summary and discussion
- 9 Outlook and concluding remarks
- Appendices
- References
- Index
Summary
This chapter details the 57-feature catalogue that serves as the basis for the study's analysis of morphosyntax aggregates. We sketch the feature selection criteria (Section 3.2) and the technicalities of the extraction process (Section 3.3). We also present concise literature reviews for each of the features considered (Section 3.4). Section 3.5 is a chapter summary that discusses some of the frequency variability thus uncovered against the backdrop of the literature.
The feature catalogue: an overview
What follows is a list of features in the catalogue, annotated with linguistic examples. The features fall into eleven major domains of English morphosyntax: pronouns and determiners, the noun phrase, primary verbs, tense and aspect, modality, verb morphology, negation, agreement, relativization, complementation, and word order and discourse phenomena.
A. Pronouns and determiners
[1] non-standard reflexives (e.g. they didn't go theirself)
[2] standard reflexives (e.g. they didn't go themselves)
[3] archaic thee/thou/thy (e.g. I tell thee a bit more)
[4] archaic ye (e.g. ye'd dancing every week)
[5] us (e.g. us couldn't get back, there was no train)
[6] them (e.g. I wonder if they'd do any of them things today)
B. The noun phrase
[7] synthetic adjective comparison (e.g. he was always keener on farming)
[8] the of -genitive (e.g. the presence of my father)
[9] the s-genitive (e.g. my father's presence)
[10] preposition stranding (e.g. the very house which it was in)
[11] cardinal number + years (e.g. I was there about three years)
[12] cardinal number + year-Ø (e.g. she were three year old)
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Grammatical Variation in British English DialectsA Study in Corpus-Based Dialectometry, pp. 32 - 70Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012