9. The historical geographical distribution of periphrastic do in southern dialects

‘Well, taakin about he da bring inta me yead wat I promised var ta tell ee about’: representations of south-western speech in nineteenth-century dialect writing

“…14 Comparison with the SED thus points to some stability over time, with Somerset as one of the focal areas and Devonshire showing a gap in the south-western distribution of periphrastic do. The exception seems to be Wiltshire, which, as we have seen, falls within Klemola's (2018) core area, at least the west of the county. It is yet worth noting that two of the three Wiltshire representations analysed are specimens of the dialect of the north of the county, where 'the rule is to employ the simple tenses instead' (Dartnell & Goddard 1893: xix).…”

“…Similarly, de Both (2019: 28–9) shows that data from the Freiburg Corpus of English Dialects (FRED, 2000–5) corroborate the SED findings insofar as do periphrasis is favoured in the dialects of Cornwall, Wiltshire and Somerset, where Jones & Tagliamonte (2004) found that periphrastic did was still used at the turn of the twenty-first century by older speakers to encode habitual meaning. As Klemola (1996: 100–1) shows, however, the SED includes occurrences of do periphrasis in present contexts to mark habitual and non-habitual aspect, which would indicate that it was not an exclusive function of this feature, as Wagner (2007: 265) also points out. In fact, Kortmann (2004: 256) explains that it is likewise employed to indicate a single event and as a tense carrier ‘in temporal or conditional clauses’, where, he notes, ‘ do is most frequently used as an analytic tense marker, again however mostly in habitual contexts’.…”

“…she be overlookin' of we) have been well reported in the literature (e.g. Ihalainen 1994;Jones & Tagliamonte 2004;Wagner 2004;Hernández 2011;Klemola 2018), information about their distribution and contexts of use prior to the SED remains rather obscure. In fact, Wagner (2012: 926) highlights that early accounts of dialect tend to discuss these features 'in terms of their presence (or absence)' with little information (if any at all) about their 'frequencies (relative and absolute) and distributional patterns'.…”

“… 11 Wagner (2007: 258) goes on to say that ‘[t]he mere presence or absence of the word “habitual” in Elworthy's verbal categories does thus not correspond to presence or absence of semantic habituality’. See also Klemola (1996: 84).…”

“… 12 Klemola (1996: 45) notes that adverbs follow do in periphrastic uses, whereas they precede it when used emphatically, as in example (3b).…”