12 - Syntactic change in north-west Norfolk

Summary

Introduction

The data presented here comes mainly from tape recordings made in the village of Docking, north-west Norfolk, thirty years apart.I Docking was the Nf. sample point in the Survey of English Dialects, henceforth SED. Nelson Francis, the SED fieldworker for Norfolk, found a good traditional informant in Docking, Mr W.S., with whom he made a tape-recorded interview, in November 1956. The entry on this informant in the SED Basic Materials (Vol. III Part I, 1969: 31) runs as follows.

W.S.^r I-IX. 65; nat.; FM and both GFM nat.; loc. school till 12; farm- labourer; lifelong res.; W (with H) is i. Dial. quite broad, good i.

The second informant, wife to W.S., is described as ‘less broad’. I shall submit that W.S. was more than ‘quite broad’ in his syntax, though not in his pronunciation. The fieldworker had obviously established a good rapport with this informant before the tape-recording session, and the style of the speaker was very relaxed. In my opinion the speaker came closer to Casual Style than Interview Style, in sociolinguistic terms. Over thirty years later, in 1990-91, I tape-recorded a number of interviews with a network of comparable elderly Docking speakers, as part of my doctoral research (Poussa 1994). Several of my informants were aged over eighty, and one recalled having worked with Mr W.S. in the 1930s. He remembered W.S. as remarkably old-fashioned. Thus we have some evidence of real- time change among traditional dialect speakers in Docking.

I shall look at two syntactic variables: the East Anglian patterning of that and it as anaphoric pronouns, which I shall refer to as that-anaphora, and the use of the relative markers, especially what. I begin with an extract from the Nelson Francis recording of 1956. Mr W.S. is talking about the advantages of drying grain in the traditional stack.

Well, my opinion about it. When you cut the corn and stack it, and that heat theself dry, that’s a proper heat, that’s a natural heat. But when that’s dried on a dryer, that’s dried and then that’s – As that go along the dryer, there’s the cool blowers what blow the cool air into it that cool it.