Was/werevariation across the generations: View from the city of York

Abstract

In this article, I describe a new research project on York English (YrkE), a variety in northeast England. In addition to providing the first systematic linguistic documentation of YrkE, I conduct a quantitative analysis of a linguistic feature which not only is well documented in the literature, but also recurs pervasively in varieties of English worldwide-was/were variation in the past tense paradigm. Two separate tendencies are observed, neither of which can be explained by any unidimensional notion of analogical leveling of the paradigm: (1) nonstandard was in existential constructions, and (2) nonstandard were in negative tags. Both trends can be tracked in apparent time in which the contrasting behavior of men and women reveals that women are leading both types of linguistic change. In other contexts, nonstandard was is a synchronic remnant which can be traced to earlier stages in the history of English.The verb to be is an interesting element of the English language. Described by Lass (1992:139) as "a collection of semantically related paradigms of various historical origins," it is basically what Pyles and Algeo (1993:127) called "a badly mixed up verb." "Most dialects have forms which differ from Standard English grammar at least in some respects" (Trudgill, 1990:98), particularly the use of was in contexts where were is required in standard English grammar (e.g., you was, we was, and they was). This variation is so endemic that Chambers (1995:242) identified it as one of the primitives of vernacular dialects of English all over the world.In the last two of decades, was/were variation has been studied in nearly all the major countries where English is spoken: the United Kingdom (Britain, forth-

Nonstandard Were and the Nonstandard forms of the Preterite Negative of to be in Nineteenth Century New England Civil War Letters and Literary Dialect Portrayals

“…As for the negative ones, it seems that tags instigate the presence of weren't, especially in the speech of the elder informants where the appearance of the phenomenon under discussion is solely reserved to tags. Furthermore, tags are also crucial in the appearance of the negative allomorph in the speech of youngsters -to some extent it corroborates the results of previous research, for instance Tagliamonte's (1998), which state that tags do contribute to the overall increase of the tendency toward weren't leveling.…”

“…In a recent study on was/were variation in the city of York, Tagliamonte (1998) found that leveling to were was largely confined to negative constructions, even though it scored much lower than in the Ocracoke brogue. According to Tagliamonte (1998: 164), the conditioning factors for nonstandard weren't usage are "polarity" and "grammatical person": in fact, her results re-13 This is the exact opposite of the "subject-type constraint" also known as the "Northern subject rule" in a British context (Britain 2002), according to which nonstandard was is more likely to occur with noun subjects rather than pronoun subjects.…”

Probabilistic Grammar: The view from Cognitive Sociolinguistics

“…For the first of these constraints, polarity, location-specific patterns have been found. For instance, Tagliamonte (1998) indicates that the presence of sentence negation disfavors the absence of agreement. This is also the effect that is generally documented in the U.S. (Tagliamonte & Baayen 2012), but in New Zealand English polarity does not seem to constrain the variation (Hay & Schreier 2004).…”

Variation and Formal Theories of Syntax, Chomskyan

“…Furthermore, these studies examine nonstandard rather than standard varieties and they may differ considerably in the frequency of the tokens collected, which may range from 29 (Cornips, 1998) to 6809 (Tagliamonte, 1998). It appears that both a low and high frequency of (morpho)syntactic variables may reveal significant correlations between the use of linguistic variants and social dimensions in the speech community.…”