Gary Thoms (gary.thoms@glasgow.ac.uk)
This course concerns the nature of linguistic variation as viewed through the lens of English microvariation. Students are introduced to major topics in comparative syntax, and then against this background we consider empirical findings from microvariation in English dialects and how they may impact upon the comparative analyses of these syntactic phenomena. The two main aim of the class are (i) to develop an understanding of the general principles of micro-comparative syntactic analysis, applicable to data from other dialect groups; (ii) to develop an understanding of how a diverse range of sources of evidence, including atlas data and corpus statistics, may be brought to bear on key questions in syntactic theory. Although the empirical focus of the class is English, we will also touch upon micro-comparative work on other dialect groups and students will be encouraged to think about how the general principles discusses in the class may apply to their own dialect group.
Topics:
- Verbal agreement
- Negative concord
- VP-ellipsis
- Auxiliary contraction
- Negation
References
Adger, David. 2006. Combinatorial variability. Journal of Linguistics 42:503–530.
Adger, David. 2011. Variability and grammatical architecture. Ms., Queen Mary (lingbuzz ).
Adger, David, and Jennifer Smith. 2010. Variation in agreement: a lexical feature-based approach. Lingua 120:1109–1134.
Barbiers, Sjef, Olaf Koeneman, and Marik Lekakou. 2010. Syntactic doubling and the structure of wh-chains. Journal of Linguistics 46:1–46.
Biberauer, Theresa, and Ian G. Roberts. 2016. Parameter typology from a diachronic perspective: the case of conditional inversion. In Theoretical approaches to linguistic variation, ed. E. Bidese, F. Cognola, and M. Moroni, 259–291. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Bošković, Zeljko.2008. What will you have, DP or NP? In Proceedings of NELS 37.
Henry, Alison. 1995. Belfast English and standard English. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
MacKenzie, Laurel. 2012. Locating variation above the phonology. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA.
Nevins, Andrew, and Jeffrey K. Parrott. 2010. Variable rules meet impoverishment theory: patterns of agreement leveling in english varieties. Lingua 120:1135–1159.
Smith, Jennifer. 2001. Negative concord in the Old and New World: evidence from Scotland. Language Variation and Change 13:109–134.
Thoms, Gary. 2010. Verb floating and VPE: towards a movement account of ellipsis licensing. Linguistic Variation Yearbook 10:252–297.
Tubau, Susagna. 2016. Lexical variation and negative concord in traditional dialects of British English. Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 19:143–177.
Zeijlstra, Hedde. 2004. Syntactic negation and negative concord. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdams.
Zwicky, Arnold M., and Geoffrey K. Pullum. 1983. Phonology in syntax: the Somali Optional Agreement Rule. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 1:385–402.