4 - Surveying the forest: on aggregate morphosyntactic distances and similarities

Summary

This chapter is descriptive in nature, aiming to set the scene for more sophisticated analyses to be presented in subsequent chapters. We will canvass aggregate morphosyntactic distances and similarities in the dataset, both among British English dialects as well as between British English dialects and Standard English varieties. In addition to reporting summary statistics, the discussion will draw on a range of exploratory cartographic visualization techniques: (reverse) network maps, beam maps, honeycomb maps, similarity maps, skewness maps, and kernel maps. Thus, Section 4.1 considers the total set of measuring points sampled in FRED. Section 4.2 takes a closer, regionally restricted look at dialects spoken in England, and at dialects spoken in Scotland and the Hebrides. Section 4.3 explores linguistic compromise and exchange areas, and seeks to identify “dialect kernels” in the dataset. Section 4.4 probes aggregate morphosyntactic distances between FRED measuring points and Standard English, British and American. Section 4.5 summarizes this chapter's major findings.

Aggregate distances and similarities: the big picture

This section explores aggregate morphosyntactic relationships among the total set of measuring points sampled in FRED. Chapter 2 explained how the present study draws on the Euclidean distance measure to calculate pairwise morphosyntactic distances between measuring points (“dialects”); thus recall that the present study defines pairwise dialectal distances as the square root of the sum of all fifty-seven feature frequency differentials (given that our feature catalogue spans fifty-seven morphosyntactic features).