Lukas Pietsch – författare

This volume offers qualitative as well as corpus-based quantitative studies on three domains of grammatical variation in the British Isles. All studies draw heavily on the Freiburg English Dialect Corpus (FRED), a computerized corpus for predominantly British English dialects comprising some 2.5 million words. Besides an account of FRED and the advantages which a functional-typological framework offers for the study of dialect grammar, the volume includes the following three substantial studies. Tanja Herrmann's study is the first systematic cross-regional study of relativization strategies for Scotland, Northern Ireland, and four major dialect areas in England. In her research design Hermann has included a number of issues crucial in typological research on relative clauses, above all the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy. Lukas Pietsch investigates the so-called Northern Subject Rule, a special agreement phenomenon known from Northern England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. His study is primarily based on the Northern Ireland Transcribed Corpus of Speech, but also on the FRED and SED data (Survey of English Dialects) for the North of England. Susanne Wagner is concerned with the phenomenon of pronominal gender, focussing especially on the typologically rather unique semantic gender system in the dialects of Southwest England.This volume will be of interest to dialectologists, sociolinguists, typologists, historical linguists, grammarians, and anyone interested in the structure of spontaneous spoken English.

This volume offers qualitative as well as corpus-based quantitative studies on three domains of grammatical variation in the British Isles. All studies draw heavily on the Freiburg English Dialect Corpus (FRED), a computerized corpus for predominantly British English dialects comprising some 2.5 million words. Besides an account of FRED and the advantages which a functional-typological framework offers for the study of dialect grammar, the volume includes the following three substantial studies.

Tanja Herrmann''s study is the first systematic cross-regional study of relativization strategies for Scotland, Northern Ireland, and four major dialect areas in England. In her research design Hermann has included a number of issues crucial in typological research on relative clauses, above all the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy. Lukas Pietsch investigates the so-called Northern Subject Rule, a special agreement phenomenon known from Northern England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. His study is primarily based on the Northern Ireland Transcribed Corpus of Speech, but also on the FRED and SED data (Survey of English Dialects) for the North of England. Susanne Wagner is concerned with the phenomenon of pronominal gender, focussing especially on the typologically rather unique semantic gender system in the dialects of Southwest England.

This volume will be of interest to dialectologists, sociolinguists, typologists, historical linguists, grammarians, and anyone interested in the structure of spontaneous spoken English.

The northern dialects of Britain and Ireland have verbal agreement patterns that differ radically from those of Standard English: the children is singing vs. they are singing vs. they sing and dances. This so-called ''Northern Subject Rule'' (agreement with adjacent personal pronoun subjects, but invariable verbal -s everywhere else), attested since the time of Middle English, was once a consistent, categorical grammatical system in the older dialects. It continues in the modern vernaculars in the form of complex variable systems, amalgamated from traditional dialectal patterns, Standard English forms, as well as modern supraregional vernacular influences. This study explores the variable use of verbal agreement forms in Scotland, northern England and Ulster, based on data ranging from the mid-20th century »Survey of English Dialects« up to dialect recordings of the 1990s. In analysing continuities and discontinuities between the different dialects involved, it also raises questions of a theoretical nature: what are the implications of these hybrid, variable systems for a usage-based theory of grammatical competence? Die Verbkongruenz in den nördlichen britischen Dialekten weicht auffällig vom Standardenglischen ab. Doch was in älteren Formen dieser Dialekte ein in sich geschlossenes System mit kategorischer Geltung war, tritt in modernen Varietäten stets variabel und in einer Vielfalt von Mischformen auf. Die Arbeit untersucht anhand von Korpora Kontinuitäten und Unterschiede zwischen den Dialekten dieser Region und diskutiert die Bedeutung solcher hybrider, variabler Systeme für eine Theorie der grammatischen Variation.