Belfast english and standard english dialect variation and parameter setting by alison henry

BELFAST ENGLISH AND STANDARD ENGLISH OXFORD STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE SYNTAX Richard Kayne, General Editor Principles and Parameters of Syntactic Saturation Gert Webelhuth Verb Movement and Expletive Subjects in the Germanic Languages Sten Vikner Parameters and Functional Heads: Essays in Comparative Syntax Edited by Adriana Belletti and Luigi Rizzi Discourse Configurational Languages Edited by Katalin E Kiss Clause Structure and Language Change Edited by Adrian Battye and Ian Roberts Belfast English and Standard English: Dialect Variation and Parameter Setting Alison Henry BELFAST ENGLISH AND STANDARD ENGLISH Dialect Variation and Parameter Setting ALISON HENRY New York Oxford OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1995 Oxford University Press Oxford New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Kuala Lumpur Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland Madrid and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Copyright © 1995 by Alison Henry Published by Oxford University Press, Inc 200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press, Inc All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Henry, Alison Belfast English and standard English : dialect variation and parameter setting / Alison Henry p cm.—(Oxford studies in comparative syntax) Includes bibliographical references and index, ISBN 0-19-508291-5 ISBN 0-19-508292-3 (pbk.) English language—Dialects—Northern Ireland—Belfast Belfast (Northern Ireland)—Social conditions T Title II Series PE2589.B44H46 1995 427' 94167—dc20 94-8751 246897531 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper For Mark Henry This page intentionally left blank Preface One of the goals of linguistic theory is to establish the extent to which all languages are similar, and the boundaries within which they may differ This book is a study of how the syntax of a non-standard dialect of English differs from standard English The analysis presented is undertaken within the Principles and Parameters framework, but it is hoped that it will also be of interest to those working in other frameworks, or interested simply in a description of the grammar of Belfast English, something which has not hitherto been available With this in mind, each chapter begins with a description of the differences between Belfast English and standard English in relation to the structure being considered, before going on to consider their analysis This is, to the best of my knowledge, one of the few wide-ranging studies of a non-standard dialect of English that has been undertaken within the Principles and Parameters framework; indeed, even articlelength studies are very few This is at first sight very surprising, given the vast amount of attention that has been devoted to standard English, and the potential contribution to the theory of studies of closely related varieties of language, as evidenced by the large quantity of fruitful research on the Romance languages, and on the Scandinavian languages A rich source of information has thus been largely unavailable to linguists hitherto; indeed, not only have treatments within the Principles and Parameters framework been unavailable, but, because of the low status generally accorded to non-standard dialects, even descriptive accounts have not been compiled It is possible to find out something about a standard language like English by looking at descriptive or pedagogical grammars; but such grammars have not in general been written viii PREFACE for non-standard varieties, which have often been regarded simply as degenerate versions of the standard (see Milroy & Milroy 1991) Although this book discusses a particular variety of English, that spoken in Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland, many of the features discussed occur in other varieties Thus a number of them occur in Hiberno-English in general—for example, inversion in embedded questions—and others are also found in some North American dialects, for example for to, which has also been documented in the Ozarks and the Ottawa Valley, possibly as a result of emigration It should thus be of interest to those working on other non-standard or regional varieties of English Earlier versions of Chapters and of this book were presented as papers at the Linguistics Association of Great Britain Conference, and I am grateful to audiences there for much useful feedback Chapter is adapted from a paper which appeared in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory (Henry 1992) I am very grateful to Jim McCloskey, Nigel Duffield, Sten Vikner, Fritz Beukema, Marcel den Dikken, David Pesetsky, and Angelika van Hout for helpful comments and discussion on the topics considered in the book Contents Introduction Subject-Verb Agreement Overt-Subject Imperatives For-To Infinitives 16 45 81 Inversion in Embedded Questions Subject Contact Relatives Conclusion 136 Notes 759 References Index 147 142 124 105 Subject Contact Relatives 135 English differ so that the former, but not the latter, allows topic-type structures of the sort we have been discussing These are not in fact 'topics' of the same type as found in standard English and discussed in Lasnik and Saito (1992) In both standard English and Belfast English, topicalisation to a position adjoined to SPEC/IP is possible (92) Newspapers, I really like (93) This pen, he writes his essays with Here, there is a gap in the site coreferential with the topic On the contrary, gaps are impossible except in subject position in overtly introduced topics (94) *See newspapers I really like (95) *You know this pen, he writes his essays with It seems that in overtly introduced topic structures, the topic sentence is outside the matrix clause This is similar to left-dislocation structures, except that instead of a single NP, a full CP is involved In standard English, TOP P does not seem to be able to be realised by a CP, but only by an NP (97) That book, I really like it In Belfast English however, it is possible for the TOPIC to contain a whole CP Exactly where this piece of information is stored in the grammar is difficult to say; but it is clearly the case that the expansion of TOP P by different phrasal categories must be a dimension along which languages and dialects may differ Conclusion In the preceding chapters we have examined a number of the ways in which Belfast English differs syntactically from standard English We saw that there are a number of underlying differences between the dialects, and even within Belfast English, and the differences did not appear to reduce to the effects of one or two parameter-setting differences whose effects spread throughout the grammar However, all of the differences observed were of the same type as differences found between languages; they related for example to the strength or weakness of functional elements, or the status of elements as clitics or independent items Thus, it seems that, if the Belfast English case is representative, dialects differ from one another, as one might expect, in the same way that languages do: the difference between "language" and "dialect" is after all more a political than a linguistic construct It was not the case that, to account for the fine-grained differences found between dialects, we had to resort to language-particular rules, or any kind of "microparameters" which differ from the kinds of parameter which account for more substantial differences between languages However, it is notable that, in order to account for the differences we found, we needed to allow the following possible types of parametric difference First, we had to allow that there could be "optionality." For example, we noted that in dialect B imperatives, raising of the verb to C was optional; the same applies to inversion in embedded questions, which may or may not occur To account for these facts, we need either to allow optionality of movement or to allow functional elements to be 136 Conclusion 137 optionally strong or weak The former approach seems not to be desirable, since we would lose the very considerable and apparently correct predictions made by the claim that movement only occurs if forced It seems therefore that the second approach is correct Functional elements may be characterised in the lexicon as strong, weak, or "either," with the imperative morpheme which occurs in C in Belfast dialect B, and the wh-complementiser which occurs in embedded questions, falling into the "either" category The only option to this would be to claim that Belfast speakers are bidialectal, sometimes using one set of parameter settings and sometimes another; but there is no evidence of this The varying elements occur alongside one another throughout conversations where there is no noticeable shift of style or topic, to a much greater extent than the normal code-mixing and code-switching which occurs among bilingual speakers Thus, first, we must admit optionality into the grammar, at least in terms of the lexical specification of functional elements Second, we must also clearly allow that parameters may be set in relation to individual functional elements in the lexicon, rather than for the language as a whole Thus, in both Belfast English and standard English C is generally weak; there is not generalised verb-raising to C as in other Germanic languages (Vikner 1991) However, Belfast English differs from standard English in that some of the elements which may occur in C are specified as strong—the imperative morpheme and the wh-complementiser which occurs in embedded questions, for example We also noted that Belfast English differed from standard English in allowing a topic-presenting sentence to occur before the root clause This meant that apparently root phenomena—such as root null subjects—could occur in what appeared to be embedded clauses, but were in fact root clauses preceded by a topic-presenting sentence Clearly, this is a phrase-structural difference between the two varieties, and seems to show that there is at least one way in which the phrase structures of different languages can be different We noted that, because of the variation apparent within Belfast English, children must be able to acquire language on the basis of input from adults whose grammars exemplify different parameter settings We saw in Chapter that under these circumstances children not necessarily select a grammar which covers all the data they hear; thus 13 BELFAST ENGLISH AND STANDARD ENGLISH the language-learning task, in terms of learnability, seems to be, not to hypothesise or select the grammar which covers all the data, but to select, from among the small range of possibilities offered by UG, the parameter setting which best fits most of the data; it thus seems that language-learning must be strongly internally driven, with internally generated possibilities being tested against the data, rather than with the data driving the acquisition of grammar We suggested that there might also be a simplicity metric involved: a grammar would be preferred which had a single specification for the C position, or all elements in that position, over one where one element which could occur in the complementiser position had to be lexically specified as different from the others; such a specification would only be developed where there was a large amount of compelling evidence in its favour Finally, it is interesting to observe that there seems to be a qualitative difference between the kind of highly constrained, parametrically specified variation we have found in this study, and the wide range of phonological variation noted in sociolinguistic studies of Belfast English phonology (Milroy 1980, Milroy 1981) There, the range of possibilities was much wider, and speakers appeared to be able to develop phonologies which incorporated rules whose probability of occurrence was weighted (see Henry, 1993 for further discussion of phonology/syntax differences in acquisition) It appears to be generally true that syntactic variation between dialects is much more restricted that phonological variation, suggesting that the learning mechanisms may be different, syntax being wholly parametrically determined, but phonology able to contain, as Bromberger and Halle (1989) suggest, at least some rules Notes Chapter Care is needed in obtaining intuitions on these cases In particular, it is important to obtain judgments from speakers who themselves use the -uns forms, rather than from speakers who have regularly heard the forms but not use them The latter appear to analyse the -uns forms as pronoun-noun combinations like you guys and thus, while permitting singular concord, not allow the -uns forms in tag questions, or for the second occurrence of a referent Chapter This means that raising does not take place to a position above NEG; in this, Belfast English differs from the Scandinavian languages, where the object moves to a position above negation It may be that the difference is caused by a different position for negation in the two language types—in NEG° in English, but left-adjoined to VP like adverbs in the Scandinavian languages Beukema and Coopmans (1989) argue that the null subject in imperatives is a variable associated with a discourse-identified null topic, rather than pro However, there is evidence against this analysis in that a null subject is an imperative cannot be third person when indentified by an appropriate discourse element (i) Everybody take out their books After that, write down their names The second sentence cannot be interpreted to mean that everyone should write down their own name; rather everyone must write down the names of another group of people The sentence must be interpreted as having the subject you, rather than everyone If the null subject were a variable bound by a discourseidentified topic, then it ought to be able to be interpreted as everyone On the 139 140 Notes contrary, the null subject must be interpreted as second person, suggesting that imperatives have an obligatorily L+2sg] AGR which identifies the subject Chapter It appears that this dialect was more widespread in the relatively recent past; thus Joyce (1910), in his book English as we speak it in Ireland notes that " 'For' is constantly used before the infinitive," quoting as an example the following lines from a folksong: 'And "Oh sailor dear" said she, "How came you here by me?" And then she began for to cry' Although Joyce suggests that this is a characterisitic borrowed from Irish, it seems in fact that "for to" occured in earlier varieties of English; it is found in Chaucer, and indeed also occurs in Shakespeare and as late as Dickens, though in the latter only in the reported speech of the "lower classes." Lightfoot (1981:111) notes that it was in common use in standard English until around 1600, quoting the following examples (ii) a b c d e / g For to go is necessary It is good for to go that stood in aunter for to die The king did it for to have sibbe This is a fouler theft than for to breke a chirche He taketh of nought else kepe, but for to fill his bages For to say the sothe, ye have done marvellously I not wish to suggest that these infinitives are true subjects; there is indeed evidence that they are not (see, for example Stowell 1981) This possibility does not exist for all speakers There is a group of speakers for whom that can only occur if it does not directly follow a wh-word, so that (ii) is grammatical but (iii) is not (iii) (iv) It depends which story that you believe *It depends which that you believe For this group of speakers that is of course impossible after whether It is, of course, possible to repeat the preposition for before an NP, as in (v) What I'm longing for is for a break but (48) does not have the repetitive quality of this example In order to maintain the argument that for is associated with complements with a particular semantics, it could conceivably be argued that there are two different fors in Belfast English, one of which has semantic content and behaves Notes 141 exactly like the standard English for, and one which has no semantic content and may appear elsewhere; there would, however, appear to be no arguments in favour of this from the Belfast English data, where for appears to behave in the same way in all cases Chapter Wonder has another use in Belfast English; it can mean "to be surprised," and with this meaning takes a that complement (vi) I wonder (that) Bill had got that letter On this reading, the example given in the text is of course grammatical It might be thought that, where a wh-element occurs with that, this is not a case where there is a wh-element in SPEC/CP and a complementiser in C, but rather a kind of topic 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