Belfast English and Standard English: Dialect Variation and Parameter Setting (Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax)

159 Pages·1995·6.28 MB·English

by  Alison Henry

BELFAST ENGLISH AND
STANDARD ENGLISH
OXFORD STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE SYNTAX
Richard Kayne, General Editor
Principles and Parameters of Syntactic Saturation
Gert Webelhuth
Verb Movement and Expletive Subjects in the
Germanic Languages
Sten Vikner
Parameters and Functional Heads: Essays in
Comparative Syntax
Edited by Adriana Belletti and Luigi Rizzi
Discourse Configurational Languages
Edited by Katalin E. Kiss
Clause Structure and Language Change
Edited by Adrian Battye and Ian Roberts
Belfast English and Standard English: Dialect
Variation and Parameter Setting
Alison Henry
BELFAST ENGLISH AND
STANDARD ENGLISH
Dialect Variation and
Parameter Setting
ALISON HENRY
New York Oxford
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1995
Oxford University Press
Oxford New York Toronto
Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi
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and associated companies in
Berlin Ibadan
Copyright © 1995 by Alison Henry
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.
200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Henry, Alison.
Belfast English and standard English : dialect variation and
parameter setting / Alison Henry.
p. cm.—(Oxford studies in comparative syntax)
Includes bibliographical references and index,
ISBN 0-19-508291-5
ISBN 0-19-508292-3 (pbk.)
1. English language—Dialects—Northern Ireland—Belfast.
2. Belfast (Northern Ireland)—Social conditions.
T. Title.
II. Series.
PE2589.B44H46 1995 427'. 94167—dc20
94-8751
246897531
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
For Mark Henry
This page intentionally left blank
Preface
One of the goals of linguistic theory is to establish the extent to which
all languages are similar, and the boundaries within which they may dif-
fer. This book is a study of how the syntax of a non-standard dialect of
English differs from standard English. The analysis presented is under-
taken within the Principles and Parameters framework, but it is hoped
that it will also be of interest to those working in other frameworks, or
interested simply in a description of the grammar of Belfast English,
something which has not hitherto been available. With this in mind,
each chapter begins with a description of the differences between
Belfast English and standard English in relation to the structure being
considered, before going on to consider their analysis.
This is, to the best of my knowledge, one of the few wide-ranging
studies of a non-standard dialect of English that has been undertaken
within the Principles and Parameters framework; indeed, even article-
length studies are very few. This is at first sight very surprising, given
the vast amount of attention that has been devoted to standard English,
and the potential contribution to the theory of studies of closely related
varieties of language, as evidenced by the large quantity of fruitful
research on the Romance languages, and on the Scandinavian lan-
guages. A rich source of information has thus been largely unavailable
to linguists hitherto; indeed, not only have treatments within the Princi-
ples and Parameters framework been unavailable, but, because of the
low status generally accorded to non-standard dialects, even descriptive
accounts have not been compiled. It is possible to find out something
about a standard language like English by looking at descriptive or ped-
agogical grammars; but such grammars have not in general been written
viii PREFACE
for non-standard varieties, which have often been regarded simply as
degenerate versions of the standard (see Milroy & Milroy 1991).
Although this book discusses a particular variety of English, that spo-
ken in Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland, many of the features dis-
cussed occur in other varieties. Thus a number of them occur in
Hiberno-English in general—for example, inversion in embedded ques-
tions—and others are also found in some North American dialects, for
example for to, which has also been documented in the Ozarks and the
Ottawa Valley, possibly as a result of emigration. It should thus be of
interest to those working on other non-standard or regional varieties of
English.
Earlier versions of Chapters 2 and 3 of this book were presented as
papers at the Linguistics Association of Great Britain Conference, and I
am grateful to audiences there for much useful feedback. Chapter 4 is
adapted from a paper which appeared in Natural Language and Linguis-
tic Theory (Henry 1992).
I am very grateful to Jim McCloskey, Nigel Duffield, Sten Vikner,
Fritz Beukema, Marcel den Dikken, David Pesetsky, and Angelika van
Hout for helpful comments and discussion on the topics considered in
the book.
Contents
1. Introduction 3
2. Subject-Verb Agreement 16
3. Overt-Subject Imperatives 45
4. For-To Infinitives 81
5. Inversion in Embedded Questions 105
6. Subject Contact Relatives 124
7. Conclusion 136
Notes 759
References 142
Index 147