Super-leveling, fraying-out, internal restructuring: A century of presentbeconcord in Tristan da Cunha English

Abstract

The present study analyzes present be leveling with pivot is (as in I is, we is, the old dogs is) in Tristan da Cunha English, a variety of South Atlantic English that developed in geographic isolation and under intense contact conditions. The findings, based on data from a total of 45 speakers born throughout the 20th century, indicate that community-wide variation correlates with social history; whereas present be was subject to (near-)categorical leveling until the 1940s, an opening-up phase after World War II saw interaction with speakers of other dialects on the island, which triggered an increase of a standard am/is/are concord pattern. Variability began to increase from the 1950s onward and the community has now frayed out widely in its usage of leveled is forms (ranging from 10% to over 90% in speakers of the youngest generation, born in the 1980s). The internal constraint ranking for preceding environment in younger generations was partially restructured, which suggests that the social changes affected the grammatical variable. Three outliers represent exonormative orientation and outward mobility.

Modeling Global Syntactic Variation in

“…Because of its long history as a colonial language (Kachru, 1990), English is now used around the world by diverse national communities. In spite of the global character of English, dialectology and sociolinguistics continue to focus largely on sub-national dialects of En-glish within so-called inner-circle varieties (for example, Labov, et al, 2016;Strelluf, 2016;Schreier, 2016;Clark & Watson, 2016). This paper joins recent work in taking a global approach by using geo-referenced texts to represent national varieties (e.g., Dunn, 2018c;Tamaredo, 2018;Calle-Martin & Romero-Barranco, 2017;Szmrecsanyi, et al, 2016;Sanders, 2010Sanders, , 2007c.f., Davies & Fuchs, 2015).…”

Dialect Formation in Isolated Communities

“…Such a concord system is at the same time simple and regular, or to make the distinction even less clear, entirely leveled. According to Schreier (2016), the most likely origin of this unusual concord system is multiple causation. Though there are no direct traces of the community founders' speech, historical records suggest that present be leveling was brought to the island via several inputs, most notably Northern English, possibly Lowland Scottish English, and St. Helenian English, and of course in existential there's PL constructions, which are a universal feature and found in all varieties.…”