BERND KORTMANN / SUSANNE WAGNER A fresh look at Late Modern English dialect syntax 1. Introduction* Although the study of non-standard varieties has received considerable attention over the past decades (cf eg the volumes edited by Milroy/Milroy 1993 or Trudgill/Chambers 1991), most of the research conducted in the field focuses on present-day variation. From the point of view of language change, dialects offer not only a unique opportunity to look at language change in progress by studying innovative features of the spoken language. They also open a window to the past since traditional varieties often exhibit conservative features which help us understand the historical paths of language change. At the same time, however, the focus of dialectological work to this day has been on phonological variation, supplemented by * The authors would like to dedicate this paper to Guenter Rohdenburg on the occasion of his 65th birthday. Guenther has not only been one of the most perceptive and productive experts on the English language and on English-German contrasts in Germany. Over the last years, Guenther, young researchers under his supervision, and colleagues inspired by his ideas have also made major contributions on functional principles accounting for grammatical variation in Present-day English and the history of English (eg the Complexity Principle as a member of the family of iconicity principles; cf for example the collection of articles in Guenter Rohdenburg and Britta Mondorf eds. 2003. Determinants of Grammatical Variation. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter). Guenter is also unique in having had a long-standing interest in dialect syntax, especially of Low German, and being among the first taking the need for comparative studies in Germanic dialect syntax seriously (witness, for example, his comparison of Low German dialects with English dialects with regard to several morphosyntactic phenomena in Bernd Kortmann (ed.) 2004. Dialectology Meets Typology. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.) The authors are thus optimistic that the present paper meets with Guenter’s interest in grammatical variation both in the history of English and English dialects, and will be deemed a suitable birthday present.

2 Bernd Kortmann / Susanne Wagner

traditional accounts of dialect lexicology. The study of dialect morphosyntax, however, is a relatively recent field of research (cf eg the contributions in the state-of-the-art volumes by Beal, Corrigan/Moisl Forthcoming, Kortmann/Schneider 2004 or Kortmann et al 2005). This neglect is especially noticeable for older periods English. The reasons for it are complex and differ from period to period. From Old English to Present-day English, authors offer numerous excuses why dialects are not good candidates for investigation:

OE: Syntactic variation between dialects has scarcely been studied and in any event the material is relatively meagre. (Toon 1992: 451) ME: The Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English (1986) provides an extensive survey of dialectal differences in the fields of phonology, morphology and lexis, but it has nothing on syntactic variants. In the introduction it is stated that ‘it may well be that syntax will perforce remain the Cinderella of Middle English dialectology’ (McIntosh et al 1986: 32). (Fischer 1992: 208) EModE: evidence of Early Modern English dialect syntax is almost nil. (Görlach 1999b: 492) LME: Knowledge of dialect variation in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was incidental and unsystematic [...] and comments were almost invariably unfavourable. (Finegan 1998: 551) PDE: Variation in syntax has been very little studied by dialectologists, for two reasons. In the first place, syntax as a branch of linguistics has not been given much attention until fairly recently. Secondly, most significant syntactic variation requires larger samples of a language than it has been convenient or even possible to collect by the usual methods. (Francis 1983: 41, our emphasis)

When summarising these statements, a rather coherent picture emerges: Most experts agree that one of the main reasons for the neglect of dialects, in general, and dialect morphosyntax, in particular, is the lack of suitable data. This is based on the fact that, first of all, only written (ie generally Standard English) material is available for earlier time periods. Secondly, researchers are faced with the problem of authenticity of the available data. Dialect literature is not as realistic as it claims to be and should be treated with caution. Thus, so-called dialect realism hampers any attempt at reconstructing valid accounts

A fresh look at Late Modern English dialect syntax 3

of historical non-standard varieties and should result in critical distance to the available material. Witness David Crystal’s statement on the situation in the nineteenth century:

During the nineteenth century, nonstandard English significantly increased its presence in national literature, moving from simple attempts at regional representation to subtle manipulations of dialect forms for literary effect. (Crystal 2004: 487)

A third reason for the neglect of dialect syntax in the nineteenth century was the focus of linguistic research on sound change. This is true of historical comparative linguistics in general and, towards the end of the nineteenth century, in the dialectological studies inspired by the Neogrammarian research programme. A fourth reason for the neglect of dialects in linguistic research until fairly recently is a very pragmatic one – there was no real interest in the topic. Rather, linguists felt that dialects have nothing to offer to researchers. They were “not usually viewed as a living medium of expression […] rather, they were thought of as relics of past times, quaint curiosities to be cherished and preserved.” (Crystal 2004: 356) Moreover, the use of dialect in every-day speech came to be viewed as increasingly negative. It was associated with lower-class and/or rural background, a change that is connected with the standardisation of written language after Middle English period (cf Finegan’s quotation on LME above). However, despite this rather negative attitude towards non-standard varieties at the time, some descriptions of dialects, even including catalogues of features, do exist and will be described in the next section. 2. Existing catalogues of Late Modern English dialect features What little we know about English dialects in the eighteenth and nineteenth century is almost exclusively based on the publications of

4 Bernd Kortmann / Susanne Wagner

the English Dialect Society (EDS), which had been founded for two basic purposes (cf eg Görlach 1999a: 31): First, its aim was to collect samples of rural speech which could be used for historical reconstruction, providing input for the comparative method, with the focus on sound comparison. The second aim was supported by the other major research interest of the time, namely lexicology. The projects were to record items of the dialect lexicon before they disappeared, ultimately serving as input for the English Dialect Dictionary (EDD; Wright 1898-1905). It is not very surprising that these purposes very much shaped the output – just compare the EDD’s more than 5000 A4-sized pages with the 700 very small pages of the English Dialect Grammar (Wright 1905). Moreover, approximately 75% of the publications used as sources for the EDD are descriptions of Northern dialects, only 10% contain information about the Southwest (cf Görlach 1999a: 30). This regional bias is another general drawback of the publications of the EDS. Highly indicative of the phonological and lexicological research focus of the EDS is the fact that only a handful of their approximately 80 publications contain information on morphological or syntactic issues. Ihalainen’s compilation of dialect markers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century (1994: 213–215) is largely based on only 6 publications of the EDS (ie less than 10% of the total number of publications). Ihalainen (1994) draws up a catalogue of morphosyntactic and phonological features; the regional distribution is given in Figure 1. 24 of these are features of morphosyntax falling into 6 groups. For each of these groups, the regional distribution is given in Figure 2. The complete feature list can be found in Appendix 1; the morphosyntactic features included in this list are the following:

dialect region features North · second person singular verb (tha knows ‘you know’)

· I is ‘I am’ · universal -s, subject to the Northern Subject Rule · at ‘that’

A fresh look at Late Modern English dialect syntax 5

Southwest · universal -th (present tense) · universal -s (non-3rd person singular present tense) · plural am · second person singular verb (thee dost know) · periphrastic do · uninflected do, have · pronoun exchange · ich ‘I’ · proclitic ’ch ‘I’ · otiose of

West Midlands · hoo ‘she’ · pronoun exchange · -na-negation · second person singular verbs (hast seen it – have you seen it?) · plural present indicative marker –en (they sayn – they say) · plural am

East Anglia · that for it · uninflected 3rd singular present tense · uninflected do, have · otiose of

Table 1. Morphosyntactic features from Ihalainen (1994) Figure 1. Distribution of eighteenth-/nineteenth-century dialect features in Ihalainen (1994)

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6 Bernd Kortmann / Susanne Wagner

Figure 2. Distribution of morphosyntactic categories in Ihalainen (1994) 3. Selected features of LME dialect syntax – past and present contexts In this section, we will contrast ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ features. The terminology used here requires some explanation. The working hypothesis is that traditional features are conservative features, whereas modern features are innovations in the respective dialects. The following analyses will show whether or not such labels are justified (thus the question marks in the section headings below). The sources for the studies presented here are the Survey of English Dialects (SED) as a window to the past (most speakers born in the last quarter of 19th century) and the Freiburg English Dialect Corpus (FRED) which is used to validate and/or contrast with the SED

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A fresh look at Late Modern English dialect syntax 7

findings (speakers born between 1890 and 1920). The two sources are contrasted in Table 2; details on the SED are published in Orton (1962), a description of FRED can be found in Kortmann/Wagner (2005), Anderwald/Wagner (Forthcoming) includes even more details.

SED FRED compiled at University of Leeds (Eugen

Dieth, Harold Orton) University of Freiburg (Bernd Kortmann)

covered area 311 localities all over England 9 major dialect areas method questionnaire-based interview authentic speech data (mostly from

oral history collections) quantity 1322 questions per location 2.45 million words

300h of speech 370 texts

time collected 1950–1961 1968–1999 speaker profile NORMs1 NORMs

Table 2. SED vs. FRED In other words, the focus of this paper will be on the latest sub-period of LME, that is roughly the last quarter of the nineteenth century until WWI (approximately a fifty-year-span from 1870 until 1920). It is important to note in this context that the principles of compilation of the SED were (still) informed by the major research background of the time: historical reconstruction of sounds and lexicography. Thus, 730 of the 1,322 questions investigate lexical differences and 387 are concerned with phonological issues. Only 205 questions (ie 15.5%) address morphological or syntactic phenomena. The majority of these questions helps us explore high-frequency features such as agreement and personal pronouns, with numerous questions relating to irregular verb paradigms. 3.1. ‘Traditional’ (conservative) features (?) Below, we will put in perspective three features on the basis of a) what we know about their history and b) what we know about their

1 See Chambers/Trudgill (²1998: 29).

8 Bernd Kortmann / Susanne Wagner

distribution in twentieth-century data. So it is primarily continuities and changes in dialect morphosyntax we will be interested in. All of these features are a part of Ihalainen’s feature catalogue. 3.1.1. The Northern Subject Rule

The Northern Subject Rule is one of the well-known features of Northern dialects’ morphosyntax. Very generally, it states that every verb in the present tense can take an -s ending, unless it is directly adjacent to a personal pronoun. Thus, both of the following are correct in those varieties which employ the rule: people says but they think and strongly believes. Pietsch (2005a; 2005b) shows in a detailed study how the feature developed from Late Middle English times onwards. One of the major results of his analyses is the surprising stability of regional characteristics over time (cf Maps 1 and 2). MANUAL PAGING

A fresh look at Late Modern English dialect syntax 9

Map 1. The NSR in Late Middle English (based on data in LALME I: 467, IV: 110–111)

© L. Pietsch

0 5 100kfieldwork

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10 Bernd Kortmann / Susanne Wagner

Just compare the southern boundaries: the outer limits of the transitional zone in the SED data (Map 1) are practically identical with the southern boundary in LME (cf Map 2). Thus we can see that the NSR is by no means a morphosyntactic feature distinctive of the dialect syntax of LME, but has a tradition reaching back at least 400 years. Map 2: Plural verbal -s in the SED fieldworker notebooks (all NP subjects)

© L. Pietsch 0 5 100k

Linguistic

Regular

Occasional

A fresh look at Late Modern English dialect syntax 11

From a global perspective, another fact is of interest: although rules like the Northern Subject Rule, also known as Singular Non-Concord in the sociolinguistic literature (for detailed background information, cf Pietsch 2005a; 2005b), are very rare in varieties of English world-wide, variation in agreement is not. In fact, just the opposite is true: In 46 non-standard varieties of English investigated, non-standard agreement was one of the features most frequently encountered (cf. Kortmann/Szmrecsanyi 2004 and Table 3). The most frequent ones can be encountered in more than half of the investigated varieties, whereas rules like the Northern Subject Rule are very rare.

feature encountered regularly in ... varieties

encountered occasionally in ... varieties

encountered in ...% of the investigated varieties

no 3rd person sg. present tense marking 23 4 58.7

was/were generalization 23 5 60.9

existential there’s etc. 21 5 56.5 deletion of be 20 5 54.3 dummy subject in existential clauses 15 5 43.5

present tense -s extended to all persons

6 11 37.0

deletion of auxiliary have 10 2 26.1

Northern Subject Rule 2 6 17.4

Table 3. Frequency of agreement features in Englishes world-wide 3.1.2 Pronoun exchange

In his feature list, Ihalainen mentions pronoun exchange for the West Midlands and the Southwest, but does not give examples. Putting it simply, pronoun exchange is the use of a subject personal pronoun in an object position or all other positions that would normally require the use of an oblique (ie non-subject) form. The reverse option (ie the use of an object form in a subject slot) is also possible, but seems to be more restricted even in very traditional dialects. Examples from FRED include they always called I ‘Willie’, see (FRED Som_009) and We

12 Bernd Kortmann / Susanne Wagner

used to stook it off didn’t us? (FRED Som_027). The most common explanation for this type of use found in the literature is that the subject forms are used when the respective form is emphasized, while the oblique forms are used in all other contexts (Elworthy 1965: 35-38; Kruisinga 1905: 35-36; Wright 1905: 271). Although pronoun exchange has had its place in the literature for centuries, it is impossible to determine how frequent it was in its heyday. Based on a study which examined the responses to some 40 questions in the SED (cf Wagner 2001, 2004), it used to be very frequent. About 50% of all pronominal forms are “exchanged” there, with significant differences between the individual case forms (see Table 4).

cases with PE total % PE I for me 63 262 24.0 her for she 411 675 60.9 us for we 59 212 27.8 them for they2 149 203 73.4 total 682 1,352 50.4

Table 4. Number of PE-cases in total of pronouns (SED published) However, when comparing these figures with data from FRED, it turns out that pronoun exchange is, with only about 1% of all pronominal forms “exchanged”, almost non-existent in the latter. This is especially noteworthy given the fact that the FRED informants are only about one generation younger than the SED informants. This contrast points to the basic problem faced by anyone studying accounts on dialects from earlier periods: in historical descriptions, non-standard features are typically discussed in terms of their presence (or absence). Modern statements, however, focus on frequencies (relative and absolute) and distributional patterns rather than mere presence or absence. For example, it is highly unlikely that the statement of a nineteenth-century author about the presence of double negation in a certain region should be taken to mean that

2 Almost exclusively used in tags.

A fresh look at Late Modern English dialect syntax 13

double negation was used in 100% of all negated cases in that particular dialect. In the case of pronoun exchange, the nature of the SED interviews, for instance, are hardly representative of actual language use. Most of the questions aimed at one particular term, and the fieldworker often used direct elicitation by asking “What do you call this?”, sometimes accompanied by showing a picture of the item in question. Thus, it is only natural for the informants to respond with “we used to call it …, didn’t we” or “they used to call it …, didn’t they”, where the emphasis is clearly on the sought-after term, adding considerably to the number of us and them in subject position. In addition, contexts with feminine pronouns in subject position are also rather frequent (eg VI.14.14 “She wears the breeches” or III.1.11 “slips the calf”), increasing the figure for her in subject position as well. Based on these findings, it is impossible to say whether pronoun exchange ever was more frequent than the data from FRED indicate. In order to determine such frequencies, it would be necessary to analyse stretches of actual speech from the time periods in question, a task that is next to impossible as interview data from the eighteenth and nineteenth century do not exist.

3.1.3. Relative clauses and relative pronouns/particles

Relative clause formation is of interest here as it represents both ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ features in the sense described earlier. Traditional (conservative) relative markers such as Northern at or (South)western as (so all as he had to do were go round in a circle all the time ... FRED Som_001) compete with modern (innovative) ones such as what (See he was the man what brought in decasualization during the war; BNC H5H). In her study, Tanja Herrmann (2003; 2005) compared traditional data (SED) with modern corpus material (data from FRED and the British National Corpus). Two major findings resulted from that study, namely that a) traditional forms are on the retreat, both to and even within their homelands, and that b) the retreat follows the predictions made by the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy. Herrmann could also show that

14 Bernd Kortmann / Susanne Wagner

those strategies which are supposedly not regionally restricted (‘zero’, ie gapping in subject position, and that) do indeed show regional preferences (cf. Table 5). zero that what as North Northern Ireland: 46.9% 50.1% –– 0.5% Scotland: 23.6% 46.2% 0.4% –– Central North: 34% 43.5% 2.4% 1.4% Central Midlands: 17.7% 40.3% 5.8% 2.4% East Anglia: 20.4% 22% 15.9% –– South Central Southwest: 28.9% 26.5% 22.3% –– Table 5. Distribution of relative markers along the North-South axis in percentages It is obvious that a corresponding table with such detailed statistics is simply impossible for LME. Secondly we note certain regional preferences: The zero option is typical of Northern Ireland; that is clearly preferred in the Midlands and North of the British Isles, whereas what, the newcomer among the relative particles in BrE dialects, is evidently making the inroads from the South. Moreover, these regional preferences are also continuities from the 18th and 19th century, including the North-South contrast concerning the choice of relative particles (cf Herrmann 2005). The study of relative clause formation strategies poses another problem: One of the most frequent non-standard strategy, namely gapping (or: zero relatives) in subject position, is next to impossible to retrieve automatically (but see Lehmann 2002). This may be one of the reasons why studies on regional contrasts between more than one or two regions such as that by Herrmann, although promising interesting results, are rarely done. 3.2. ‘Modern’ – innovative – features (?)

This section will focus on those features that are not explicitly mentioned by Ihalainen which were very likely present during the time period under discussion, but which were not reported on for a number of reasons. Among the most likely motives for not mentioning a feature are stigmatisation (likely for e.g. multiple negation) and/or unawareness of regional contrasts.

A fresh look at Late Modern English dialect syntax 15

3.2.1. Multiple negation

Multiple negation has been retreating naturally since Late Middle English (cf eg Iyeiri 2001: 130) before it was finally ruled out by prescriptivists. Nevertheless, it is one of the most frequently found features of non-standard varieties world-wide and lives on in many English dialects to the present day. It is among those features which are generally considered ‘universal’ in the sense that it does not exhibit regional contrasts or a clear-cut regional distribution. Contrasting with this opinion, Anderwald (Forthcoming) shows that there is a clear North-South contrast for the frequency of negative concord: Based on data from the BNC and FRED, it turns out that multiple negation is most frequently found in the South. It is least frequent in Wales, Scotland, and the North of England, with intermediate values for the Midlands. Although this was hinted at in earlier publications (cf eg Cheshire et al 1989: 205206; 1993: 75-76), quantitative evidence to strengthen the claim could generally not be provided. 3.2.2 Pseudo-passives with stood/sat

It appears that the pseudo-passive construction with sat and stood represents a relatively recent, nineteenth century Northern innovation, an innovation that took place as a consequence of dialect contact between speakers of the standard dialect and speakers of Northern vernacular varieties of English (Klemola 2002: 55). Pseudo-passives with stood and sat are well-known and generally classified as colloquialism rather than regional dialect feature. However, Klemola’s analysis (2002: 53–54) reveals a clear Northern bias. He found frequencies of pseudo-passive stood/sat of 2.5 per 100,000 words in the SED recordings and ca 2 per 100,000 words in the BNC demographic sample. In their more modern data, Cheshire et al found that the distribution of the construction in their survey “points to a recent diffusion […] from the north and west of England.” They therefore concluded that the feature may now be “becoming a characteristic of a general non-standard or semistandard variety of English” (1989: 200; cf also 1993: 70-71). Why the feature spreads from the North and the

16 Bernd Kortmann / Susanne Wagner

Southwest, two discontinuous areas, is unclear and should be investigated in the future. The regional distribution of pseudo-passives with stood/sat in FRED (see Table 6) is very much in line with Klemola’s findings, with frequencies similar to those of the SED recordings. Based on the rather high frequencies in the SED material, and even higher ones in FRED, we assume that stood/sat pseudo-passive are another candidate for a regionally distinctive dialect feature (North and Southwest) in the LME period, despite the fact that they are not mentioned in contemporary dialect descriptions. # of words sat stood per 100,000 words Southwest 571,421 12 7 3.33 Southeast 642,613 0 1 0.16 Midlands 359,074 0 1 0.28 North 434,306 17 8 5.76 Celtic 673,639 3 1 0.59 Total 2,681,053 32 18 1.86

Table 6. Distribution of pseudo-passives with stood/sat in FRED Klemola did not contrast past and non-past contexts in his study. The FRED data show a higher frequency of non-past forms (e.g. now I’m going to tell you, and this is true as ever I’m sat in this chair FRED Som_010) in the South(west) than elsewhere (see Figure 3) – the question of whether this is in any way indicative of a further spread of the feature to non-past contexts awaits further analysis.

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A fresh look at Late Modern English dialect syntax 17

Figure 3. Distribution of stood and sat according to context 4. Conclusion and outlook Two problems have emerged with regard to what is known about LME dialect syntax: (i) Accounts of variation in this period mention features for their presence or absence so that it is often impossible to determine to what extent present-day features are innovative or conservative. In other words, it is impossible to determine the nature and range of continuity and changes. (ii) Modern accounts, on the other hand, tend to focus on the distribution of features in terms of frequencies of occurrence rather than the absolutes ‘present’ or ‘absent’. In fact, these differences in methodology make it impossible or at least very difficult to compare feature catalogues from the eighteenth and nineteenth century with descriptions of present-day variation focussing on quantitative statements. For obvious reasons, a feature’s frequency of occurrence could not be studied in earlier periods. Thus it seems not only possible but indeed highly likely that some of the features mentioned by experts for earlier periods never were more frequent than they are in the SED or FRED data (or even the BNC). With such background knowledge, it is to be expected that modern studies are in fact based on this rather skewed picture, which in turn may result in wrong expectations, wrong focus or even the analysis of the wrong feature(s). Therefore, some of the not-so-highly-stigmatised features are not mentioned in either historical or modern accounts, pointing to the fact that those features operated (and still operate) below the level of (even an expert’s) consciousness. As a consequence, what little is known about regionally distinctive features cannot be quantified. Features that seem worth investigating from a modern point of view (eg in the FRED data) are often not mentioned at all in early studies so that regional preferences

18 Bernd Kortmann / Susanne Wagner

and developments can neither be traced nor tested. This ignorance is particularly noteworthy when studying the North-South contrast, which could recently be correlated with morphosyntactic features that were not assumed to show regionally distinct patterns (eg Anderwald on multiple negation). In addition to multiple negation, there seems to be a bundle of features (eg relative clause formation strategies) that can be associated with a basic North-South contrast. These two regions are highly distinctive not only when looking at traditional features, but possibly also (or particularly) when analysing ‘new’ features that were either too stigmatised to be studied in detail before (eg multiple negation) or too unremarkable to warrant detailed analyses. It is thus possible that those ‘universal’ features have always shown regional contrasts in their distribution which experts have been and indeed largely still are simply unaware of (cf Kortmann/Szmrecsanyi 2004). It turns out, then, that our fresh look at LME dialects has proved to be a rather devastating or at least sobering one. All the problems we know about from present-day dialect syntax are multiplied when wanting to study LME. And even what little we seem to know needs to questioned and often does not help us answer questions from a PDE perspective. This situation can only be remedied by compiling corpora that are representative of the regional differences of the time. First efforts in this direction have been undertaken by the Helsinki school, promoting the field of historical sociolinguistics (see eg Raumolin-Brunberg 1996). Data collection for such corpora is very time-consuming, involving searches through archives and private collections in order to unearth written material that comes as close to natural speech data as possible (partial reconstruction eg by studying the settlement histories of regions with transplanted dialects). Pinning down an author’s regional background is also not an easy task. It is to be hoped that collaborative work will ultimately result in a database that can be used to answer at least some of the questions posed in this article. References

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Iyeiri, Yoko (ed.) Aspects of Negation. Kyoto: Kyoto University Press. Anderwald, Lieselotte / Wagner, Susanne Forthcoming. The Freiburg English Dialect

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___ 1993. Non-standard English and Dialect Levelling. In Milroy, James / Milroy, Lesley (eds.) Real English. The Grammar of English Dialects in the British Isles. London: Longman, 53-96.

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Finegan, Edward 1998. English Grammar and Usage. In: Romaine, Suzanne (ed.) The Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. IV: 1776-1997. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 536-588.

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___ 2005. Relative Clauses in English Dialects of the British Isles. In Kortmann et al (eds.), 21-123.

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A fresh look at Late Modern English dialect syntax 21

Appendix 1. Dialect markers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century (Ihalainen 1994: 213-215) Northern features: 1. Northern lack of rounding 2. Northern oo-fronting 3. Northern long a 4. /ai/-monophthongisation 5. yod-formation 6. l-vocalisation/dropping 7. linking v 8. soom ‘some’ 9. hoose ‘house’ 10. y-laxing 11. t’ for the (def. article realised as stop) 12. sal, ’s ‘shall’ 13. second person singular verb (tha knows ‘you know’) 14. I is ‘I am’ 15. universal -s, subject to the Northern Subject Rule 16. at ‘that’ West Midlands 1. West midland ngg 2. rounding before nasals 3. ai-rounding 4. same/seem switch 5. hoo ‘she’ 6. pronoun exchange 7. -na-negation 8. second person singular verbs (hast seen it – have you seen it?) 9. plural present indicative marker –en (they sayn – they say) 10. plural am Southwestern features 1. voicing of initial fricatives 2. retention of ME ai 3. r for gh 4. universal -th (present tense) 5. universal -s (non-third person singular present tense) 6. plural am 7. second person singular verb (thee dost know) 8. periphrastic do 9. uninflected do, have

22 Bernd Kortmann / Susanne Wagner

10. pronoun exchange 11. ich ‘I’ 12. proclitic ’ch ‘I’ 13. otiose of East Anglian features 1. Norwich a 2. that for it 3. uninflected third singular present tense 4. uninflected do, have 5. otiose of