In search of grammaticalization in synchronic dialect data: General extenders in north-east England

Pichler, H and Levey, S 2011, 'In search of grammaticalization in synchronic dialect data: General extenders in north-east England' , English Language and Linguistics, 15 (3) , pp. 441-471.

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Abstract

In this paper, we draw on a socially stratified corpus of dialect data collected in north-east England to test recent proposals that grammaticalization processes are implicated in the synchronic variability of general extenders (GEs), i.e., phrase- or clause-final constructions such as and that and or something. Combining theoretical insights from the framework of grammaticalization with the empirical methods of variationist sociolinguistics, we operationalize key diagnostics of grammaticalization (syntagmatic length, decategorialization, semantic-pragmatic change) as independent factor groups in the quantitative analysis of GE variability. While multivariate analyses reveal rapid changes in apparent time to the social conditioning of some GE variants in our data, they do not reveal any evidence of systematic changes in the linguistic conditioning of variants in apparent time that would confirm an interpretation of ongoing grammaticalization. These results lead us to question

Item Type:	Article
Themes:	Subjects outside of the University Themes
Schools:	Schools > School of Humanities, Languages & Social Sciences > Centre for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
Journal or Publication Title:	English Language and Linguistics
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Refereed:	Yes
ISSN:	1360-6743
Depositing User:	HS Pichler
Date Deposited:	26 Oct 2011 09:45
Last Modified:	15 Feb 2022 16:09
URI:	https://usir.salford.ac.uk/id/eprint/18658

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