8 - Summary and discussion

Summary

In this book, we have sought to address the spatial nature of large-scale morphosyntactic variability in British English dialects. This chapter pulls together the study's major findings. We first summarize the empirical facts in Section 8.1, and subsequently move on to a detailed discussion of the role that geography plays in structuring morphosyntactic variability in Great Britain (Section 8.2).

Summary: morphosyntactic variability in British English dialects

Chapter 1 outlined three major research questions which guided the present study. The big, overarching question was whether corpus-derived and frequency-based patterns of aggregate syntactic and morphological variability – calculated on the basis of the joint frequency variance of fifty-seven morphosyntactic features in spontaneous speech, as sampled in the Freiburg Corpus of English Dialects (FRED) – exhibit a geolinguistic signal. The short answer to this question is “yes.” The long answer goes as follows.

Among other things, we saw in Chapter 3 that according to a relatively conservative statistical gauge, fourteen – or about 25 percent – of the fifty-seven morphosyntactic features covered in this study are, on an individual basis, geographically distributed in FRED. The identities of the features that make it into Table 8.1, which provides an exhaustive list, should not cause major surprises (though maybe a few little ones) given the literature on grammatical variability in the British Isles (we discussed Britain 2010 as an example in this connection). What about the other forty-three features? While these are geolinguistically inconspicuous when considered in isolation, we nonetheless included them in the subsequent empirical analyses.