The subjects on morphology and syntax

With the exception of the West Midlands and the Channel Islands, all regional and ethnic (British Creole) varieties in the British Isles discussed in the phonology volume have a companion topic in the morphosyntax volume. In all morphosyntax the features described are distinctive of the relevant varieties, but in the vast majority of cases not to be understood as unique to these varieties. Another property the majority share is that they provide qualitative, only exceptionally quantitative, accounts based on large digitized and/or computerized corpora of spontaneous non-standard present-day speech.

The one by Melchers on Orkney and Shetland is geared towards highlighting morphosyntactic features which are distinctive of the Northern Isles especially due to their Scandinavian substratum. The Scandinavian features are particularly pronounced at the Broad Scots end of the dialect continuum. Especially for the Central Lowlands (Edinburgh and East Lothian), this is also the focus of Miller’s chapter on Scottish English. Southern Irish English, but also varieties of Ulster and Ulster Scots stand at the centre of Filppula’s chapter on Irish English. Especially the morphosyntax of Irish English varieties shows an interesting mix of features which, due to one or a combination of the following four factors, have affected the development of Irish English: retention of features from earlier periods of English, dialect contact with other varieties spoken in the British Isles, substratal influence from the indigenous Celtic language (Irish), and universal features we associate with varieties resulting from rapid, large-scale second-language acquisition. The second and third of these features also figure prominently in Penhallurick’s account of the morphosyntax of Welsh English: the influences of Welsh, and of the regional dialects spoken in the neighboring counties of England.

Beal provides a survey of features found in the grammars of varieties spoken in the North of England, the vast majority of which are restricted to particular regions or cities. This variation in the morphology and syntax reflects the diverse histories of the different parts and urban centres of the North: in the far north, the shared history with Scotland and the continuing migration from central Scotland to Tyneside; the large-scale medieval Scandinavian settlements in an area stretching from the Northwest (Cumbria) south-east down to East Anglia, the so-called “Scandinavian belt” (including, for example, all of Yorkshire); in the large cities like Liverpool, Newcastle, and Manchester, high Irish immigration since the 19^th century.

Three topics are concerned with the morphology and syntax of non-standard varieties spoken in the southern parts of England. Trudgill deals with East Anglia, Wagner with the Southwest (traditionally known as the West Country), and Anderwald with the Southeast (London and the neighboring counties, the so-called Home Counties). East Anglia and the Southwest have been well-established dialect areas since medieval times, especially the Southwest still boasting not only a unique mix of morphosyntactic features but also individual morphosyntactic properties which are truly unique to this area. The Southeast, by contrast, is a relatively young and, at least with regard to grammar, surprisingly underresearched area in modern dialect research. Here most morphosyntactic features seem to be representative of non-standard speech in present-day England in general. Anderwald’s survey is based, among other things, on quantitative analyses of the British National Corpus (BNC), the Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language (COLT) and the Freiburg English Dialect Corpus (FRED), and provides a solid basis for studies wanting to explore the extent to which the Southeast may be responsible for the (partly ongoing) spread of the relevant morphosyntactic features in the British Isles.

The topic on the Southeast is also useful background reading against which to judge Sebba’s observations on British Creole, since the conversational data Sebba has analyzed are all taken from British-born Caribbean adolescents living in London. This contact variety displays a fascinating degree of syntactic variability which cannot be explained by a continuum model, as known from pidgin and creole studies, alone. What additionally needs to be factored in is, for example, the existence of (especially Jamaican) creole- and standard-like variants for many linguistic forms, and the fact that (for a variety of reasons) speakers often mix Creole and English English forms.