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Variation in English syntax: theoretical implications

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 July 2007

DAVID ADGER  and
GRAEME TROUSDALE
DAVID ADGER
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 6UN [email protected]
GRAEME TROUSDALE
Affiliation:
Linguistics and English Language, School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, 14 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9LN, Scotland, [email protected]
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Abstract

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This article provides an overview of the relationship between studies of syntactic variation in dialects of English and theoretical accounts of language structure. In the first section of the article, we provide a discussion of the place of syntactic variation within various subdisciplines of linguistic enquiry: we address issues such as I- and E-language, the place of Standard English in linguistic theory, and interfaces between traditional dialectology, variationist sociolinguistics, and theoretical linguistics. These interfaces suggest the need for a clarification of the nature and status of the (morpho)syntactic variable, which we provide in section 3; and in section 4, we examine the way in which (morpho)syntactic variation is treated within a number of theoretical models – for instance, Principles and Parameters theory, HPSG, OT, and cognitive linguistics (including Word Grammar and Construction Grammar) – all of which feature in the other articles in this special issue.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 11 , Issue 2: Special issue on English dialect syntax , July 2007 , pp. 261 - 278
Copyright
Cambridge University Press 2007

Footnotes

We are grateful to Jenny Cheshire, Bernd Kortmann, Laura Rupp, and Jennifer Smith for their comments on previous versions of this article.