Stevenson, Jonathan (2016) Dialect in digitally mediated written interaction: a survey of the geohistorical distribution of the ditransitive in British English using Twitter. MA by research thesis, University of York.
Abstract
Recent research (Gerwin, 2013; Siewierska & Hollmann, 2007; Yáñez Bouza & Denison, 2015) uses historical and contemporary corpora to quantify diachronic and spatial distributions of variants of the ditransitive in British English. Each study pays particular attention to ditransitives with two pronominal objects, where internal factors influencing variation are reduced primarily to the choice of pronoun and verb type. Three variants are attested, a ‘prepositional dative’ (PDAT - ‘send it to me’), a double-object (GTD - ‘send me it’) and an alternative regionally marked double object construction (TGD - ‘send it me’). Corpus evidence reveals the pronominal TGD as the most frequent variant until the beginning of the 19th century, when the PDAT gained preference. The pronominal GTD, now considered canonical, emerges at the beginning of the 20th century. Broad agreement over the geographical distribution of the ditransitive is based primarily on maps drawn from the Survey of English Dialects (SED), but “comprehensive frequency data” (Yáñez Bouza & Denison, 2015, p.248) is lacking. The current project provides detailed frequency data drawn from language use on Twitter which is accurately mapped according to GPS coding. This map shows remarkable crossover with the SED maps, demonstrating both the stability of the geographical distribution over time and the amenability of “interactive written discourse” (Ferrara, Brunner, & Whittemore, 1991) to the expression of dialect. The results detail a large degree of variation in the relative frequency of each variable over physical space. Such variation brings into focus some important questions regarding the nature of a language as conceived in formal linguistic theory and a problematic tendency to ‘lump together’ large, linguistically diverse regions and treat them as one entity (Siewierska & Hollmann, 2007, p.97). Instead, using statistical tests for difference, the present study groups contiguous regions by the relative probabilistic frequencies of each variant. The results have implications for dialect geography, dialect syntax and recent approaches concerning regionally sensitive probabilistic approaches to grammar (Bresnan & Ford, 2010).
Metadata
Supervisors: | Llamas, Carmen |
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Related URLs: | |
Awarding institution: | University of York |
Academic Units: | The University of York > Language and Linguistic Science (York) |
Depositing User: | Mr Jonathan Stevenson |
Date Deposited: | 09 Aug 2017 14:16 |
Last Modified: | 09 Aug 2017 14:16 |
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