Why Dialect Grammar Matters
نویسندگان
چکیده
Five years ago, in the European English Messenger VII/2 (Spring 1998), Peter Trudgill gave an illuminating account of "Standard English: What It Isn't". In a way, the following paper adopts a complementary perspective. It explores what non-standard English is, or rather what is fascinating about non-standard varieties of English (besides telling us more about what Standard English isn't or hasn't) when focussing on their morphology and syntax. During the last two decades, but especially over the last few years, this field of research has been very much on the rise, after more than a century of neglect in dialectology. Dialect grammar has attracted attention from a sociolinguistic, a generative and, most recently, from a typological angle. It is the latter approach which will take centre stage in this paper. I will present an outline of the major goals of a research project at the University of Freiburg, its methodology, some first results and, finally, of what we can learn from the grammar of non-standard varieties (in English and other languages) for the study of large-scale language comparison.
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