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Morphosyntactic Variation in British English Dialects

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Morphosyntactic Variation in British English Dialects Morphosyntactic Variation in British English Dialects Evidence from Possession, Obligation and Past Habituality Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung der Doktorwürde der Philologischen Fakultät der Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg i. Br. vorgelegt von Monika Schulz aus Freiburg Sommersemester 2010 Erstgutachter: Prof. Dr. Bernd Kortmann Zweitgutachter: Prof Dr. Christian Mair Drittgutachter: Prof. Dr. Peter Auer Vorsitzender des Promotionsausschusses der Gemeinsamen Kommission der Philologischen, Philosophischen und Wirtschafts- und Verhaltenswissenschaftlichen Fakultäten: Prof. Dr. Hans-Helmuth Gander Datum der Disputation: 17. März 2011 Für Natalie, Anemone and Maria Acknowledgements During the lengthy and sometimes stony way to the completion of my dissertation I have accumulated many debts, only some of which I have space to acknowl- edge here. First and foremost I am indebted to my supervisor Bernd Kortmann for his unwavering faith, patience and support when things took rather longer than I had promised him they would take. I cannot thank Elizabeth Traugott enough, who graciously made time to read and comment on several draft versions of the individual chapters and made me rethink and refine my ideas over and over again. Several rounds of heartfelt thanks go to Sali Tagliamonte, who rescued me when I was despairing over GoldVarb, to Stephanie Harves, Heidi Harley and Gillian Ramchand for getting me into Minimalism and Distributed Morphology and making me think outside my box, to Jay Atlas for a wonderful class on prag- matics and for listening to my ramblings about HAVE got(ten), and to Joan Beal, Karen Corrigan and Clive Upton for their dialectological input at many of the conferences I went to. Needless to say, all remaining errors and shortcomings are entirely my own. General thanks go to the audiences of Forces in Grammatical Structures (FIGS) in Paris (2007), the 29th Annual Meeting of the German Language Society (DGfS) in Siegen (2007), the International Conference on the Linguistics of Contempo- rary English (ICLCE) 2007 and 2009 in Toulouse and London, the 6th UK Lan- guage Variation and Change Conference (UKLVC) in Lancaster (2007), the 17th Sociolinguistics Symposium in Amsterdam (2008), the 13th Conference on Me- thods in Dialectology in Leeds (2008), the 15th International Conference on Eng- lish Historical Linguistics (ICEHL) in Munich (2008), and the 31st conference of the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME) in Gießen (2010). My colleagues both in Freiburg and in Hamburg have been wonderful. I am grateful to Susanne Wagner for answering all my questions and being a trusty con- ference companion, to Agnes Schneider and Svenja Kranich for discussions about aspect, to Alice Blumenthal for her input on frequency, to Lisa Kühne for sharing her chocolate and to Verena Schröter for the best last-minute proof-reading I could have wished for. Thank you for being such great friends! My warmest thanks, finally, go to my family and my partner. Their support and encouragement has been exceptional right up to the last minute. I dedicate this dissertation to them. Contents Nomenclature . v List of Tables . vii List of Figures . x 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Dialect syntax . 1 1.2 Dialectology, variationist sociolinguistics and language change . 3 1.3 The phenomena under investigation . 6 1.4 In a nutshell: Previous research, aims and outline . 8 1.5 A note on notation . 12 2 Theoretical foundations: Auxiliaries, possession, modality and aspect 13 2.1 Aims and outline . 13 2.2 Auxiliaries . 14 2.2.1 Auxiliaries: Synchrony . 14 2.2.2 Auxiliaries: Diachrony . 17 2.3 Possession . 20 2.3.1 The cognitive construal of possession . 21 2.3.2 HAVE and HAVE GOT as markers of possession . 25 2.4 The Semantics of modality . 27 2.4.1 Synchrony . 27 2.4.2 Diachrony . 35 2.5 Obligation . 37 2.5.1 The semantics of obligation . 37 2.5.2 MUST, HAVE TO, HAVE GOT TO and NEED TO as markers of strong obligation . 40 2.5.3 The syntactic behavior of MUST, HAVE TO and HAVE GOT TO 44 i Contents ii 2.5.4 Obligation and possession: Structural similarities . 47 2.6 Aspect (and aktionsart) . 51 2.7 Past habituality . 56 2.7.1 The semantics of past habituality . 56 2.7.2 WOULD and USED TO as overt markers of past habituality . 59 3 Methodological foundations: Language variation and change 65 3.1 Aims and outline . 65 3.2 Theories of language change . 66 3.3 Grammaticalization . 68 3.4 Variationist sociolinguistics: Synchronic variation and diachronic change . 81 3.4.1 Structured heterogeneity and the linguistic variable . 81 3.4.2 GoldVarbX: The statistical implementation of the joint effect of a set of independent variables . 84 3.4.3 The comparative dimension . 87 3.5 Measuring degrees of grammaticalization: A variationist approach . 89 4 Empirical foundations: The Freiburg Corpus of English Dialects 92 4.1 Aims and outline . 92 4.2 Dialectology and corpus linguistics . 93 4.3 The Freiburg Corpus of English Dialects: Oral history interviews and past tense narratives . 94 4.4 Dialect areas and speakers . 95 4.5 Complementary corpora . 103 5 The development of possessive HAVE GOT 104 5.1 Aims and outline . 104 5.2 The hypothesis of got-insertion . 106 5.3 Problems with the hypothesis of got-insertion . 110 5.4 From HAVE got(ten) to HAVE GOT . 112 5.5 The conventionalization of conversational implicatures: ‘Onset of posses- sion’ and ‘stative possession’ . 114 5.6 Conventionalization and its reflexes . 121 5.7 Summary . 131 Contents iii 6 Intraference: The development of HAVE TO and HAVE GOT TO 133 6.1 Aims and outline . 133 6.2 The diachronic development of HAVE TO . 135 6.3 The diachronic development of HAVE GOT TO . 142 6.4 Summary . 153 7 Past possession and obligation in the dialect data 155 7.1 Aims and outline . 155 7.2 HAD and GOT: Disambiguating past possession and past obligation . 156 7.3 Past possession and past obligation . 173 7.3.1 HAD GOT and HAD GOT TO: elusive forms . 174 7.3.2 The link between past possession and past obligation . 175 7.3.3 Past possession and negation . 180 7.3.4 Past obligation and negation . 182 7.4 Present tense obligation and the trend towards monosemy . 184 7.5 Summary . 187 8 WOULD and USED TO: a variable rule analysis of dialectal differences 188 8.1 Aims and Outline . 188 8.2 WOULD and USED TO: Diachrony . 189 8.2.1 The diachronic dimension: WOULD . 189 8.2.2 The diachronic dimension: USED TO . 190 8.3 Previous studies . 197 8.4 WOULD and USED TO: Disambiguating past habituality . 201 8.5 Determinants and the variable context . 204 8.6 Low-frequency tokens and interaction effects . 212 8.7 Relative frequencies and the patterning of constraints: Converging evidence?217 8.8 Summary . 237 9 Conclusion 239 Appendices A Data points and speakers 246 A.1 Midlands . 247 A.2 North . 250 Contents iv B German Summary 252 Corpora and Sources 256 References 258 Nomenclature AAVE African American Vernacular English ARCHER A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers ASIS Syntactic Atlas of Northern Italy BNC British National Corpus BROWN The Standard Corpus of Present-Day Edited American English CONTE Corpus of Early Ontario English DCPSE Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English Edisyn European Dialect Syntax FLOB Freiburg-LOB Corpus FRED Freiburg Corpus of English Dialects FROWN The Freiburg-Brown Corpus of American English ICE India The International Corpus of English: The Indian Component ICE Jamaica The International Corpus of English: The Jamaican Component ICE-AUS The International Corpus of English: The Australian Component ICE-GB The International Corpus of English: The British Component LION Literature Online LOB Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen Corpus v Nomenclature vi MED Middle English Dictionary OED Oxford English Dictionary SAND Syntactic Atlas of Dutch Dialects ScanDiaSyn Scandinavian Dialect Syntax SEU Survey of English Usage List of Tables 2.1 The NICE properties illustrated . 15 2.2 Structural properties of pre-auxiliaries in Old and Middle English as pos- tulated in Warner (1993: 152) . 19 2.3 Parameters of possession after Heine (1997: 39) . 21 2.4 Event schemata for predicative possession after Heine (1997: 47) . 21 2.5 Auxiliary properties of HAVEin possessive HAVEand HAVEGOT based on Quirk et al. (1985: 131-132) and Biber et al. (1999: 160, 216) . 26 2.6 Syntactic uses of HAVE TO adapted from Myhill (1996: 247) . 45 2.7 Distribution of MUST, HAVE TO and HAVE GOT TO across present tense syntactic and nonsyntactic contexts in the Midlands and the North . 46 2.8 Distribution of MUST, HAVE TO and HAVE GOT TO across present tense nonsyntactic contexts in the Midlands and the North . 47 2.9 Auxiliary properties of HAVE TO and HAVE GOT TO based on Krug (2000: 107-109) and Biber et al. (1999: 162, 216) . 48 2.10 Auxiliary properties of HAVE in possessive HAVE, HAVE GOT, HAVE TO and HAVE GOT TO . 50 4.1 The Midlands subcorpus . 99 4.2 The North subcorpus . 100 5.1 Raw frequencies of reduced HAVE in LION between 1600 and 1650 . 111 5.2 Changes from present perfect HAVE got(ten) to possessive HAVE GOT . 122 5.3 The patterning of statives and non-stative participles after Embick (2003: 152) . 127 6.1 Possession and obligation: the “incomplete” paradigm . 134 6.2 Possession and obligation: the “complete” paradigm . 134 vii List of Tables viii 6.3 Overview of corpora used for empirical studies on HAVE TO vs HAVE GOTTO...................................144 6.4 Possession and obligation: dating the “incomplete” paradigm. 151 6.5 Possession and obligation: dating the “complete” paradigm. 151 6.6 Possession and obligation: the “incomplete” paradigm .
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