DIALECTS ACROSS BORDERS AMSTERDAM STUDIES IN THE THEORY AND HISTORY OF LINGUISTIC SCIENCE General Editor E.F.K. KOERNER (Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaf, Typologie und Universalienforschung, Berlin) Series IV – CURRENT ISSUES IN LINGUISTIC THEORY Advisory Editorial Board Lyle Campbell (Salt Lake City); Sheila Embleton (Toronto) Brian D. Joseph (Columbus, Ohio); John E. Joseph (Edinburgh) Manfred Krifa (Berlin); E. Wyn Roberts (Vancouver, B.C.) Joseph C. Salmons (Madison, Wis.); Hans-Jürgen Sasse (Köln) Volume 273 Markku Filppula, Juhani Klemola, Marjatta Palander and Esa Penttilä (eds.) Dialects Across Borders Selected papers from the th International Conference on Methods in Dialectology (Methods XI), Joensuu, Finland, August 2002 DIALECTS ACROSS BORDERS SELECTED PAPERS FROM THE 11TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON METHODS IN DIALECTOLOGY (METHODS XI), JOENSUU, AUGUST 2002 Edited by MARKKU FILPPULA University of Joensuu JUHANI KLEMOLA University of Tampere MARJATTA PALANDER University of Joensuu ESA PENTTILÄ University of Joensuu JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA �� Te paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences — Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-984. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dialects Across Borders : Selected papers from the th International Conference on Methods in Dialectology (Methods XI), Joensuu, August 2002 / edited by Markku Filppula, Juhani Klemola, Marjatta Palander and Esa Penttilä. p. cm. -- (Amsterdam studies in the theory and history of linguistic science. Series IV, Current issues in linguistic theory, ISSN 0304-0763 ; v. 273) Includes bibliographical references and index. . Dialectology--Methodology--Congresses. P367 .I49 2005 47/.20--dc22 2005055892 ISBN 90 272 4787 0 (Hb; alk. paper) © 2005 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. • P.O.Box 36224 • 020 ME Amsterdam • Te Netherlands John Benjamins North America • P.O.Box 2759 • Philadelphia PA 98-059 • USA � CONTENTS Introduction vi PART I: Dialects across political and historical borders 1 The construction of linguistic borders and the linguistic construction of borders Peter Auer 3 Static spatial relations in German and Romance: Towards a cognitive dialectology of posture verbs and locative adverbials Raphael Berthele 31 Ingressive particles across borders: Gender and discourse parallels across the North Atlantic Sandra Clarke and Gunnel Melchers 51 On the development of the consonant system in Mennonite Low German (Plautdietsch) Larissa Naiditch 73 English dialects in the British Isles in cross-variety perspective: A base-line for future research Sali Tagliamonte, Jennifer Smith and Helen Lawrence 87 PART II: Dialects across social and regional borders 119 Dialects across internal frontiers: Some cognitive boundaries Dennis R. Preston 121 On ‘dative sickness’ and other linguistic diseases in modern Icelandic Finnur Friđrikson 157 Can we find more variety in variation? Ronald Macaulay 173 vi CONTENTS Pronunciation of /i/ in avant-garde Dutch: A cross-sex acoustic study Vincent J. van Heuven, Renée van Bezooijen and Loulou Edelman 185 A tale of two dialects: Relativization in Newcastle and Sheffield Joan C. Beal and Karen P. Corigan 211 PART III: Dialects across language boundaries 231 Crossing grammatical borders: Tracing the path of contact-induced linguistic change Ruth King 233 The after-perfect in Irish English Patricia Ronan 253 Dialect history in black and white: Are two colors enough? J. L. Dilard 271 Index of languages and dialects 287 Subject index 289 INTRODUCTION Until fairly recently, the word ‘dialect’ carried the connotation of being something antiquated and having low social status. The situation is now very different: along with the general rise of language awareness in modern societies, nonstandard varieties of languages have become an object of new interest, which in turn is reflected in their generally improved position even in educational systems. A similar change has taken place in scholarly research on dialects. This is partly due to the recent advances in the methods used in dialectological research. The advent of computer-assisted methods has enabled study of significantly larger databases than in traditional dialectological research. Also, methods derived from sociolinguistic and variation studies have greatly added to the general interest of dialect studies and distanced them even further from the ‘butterfly collecting’ mentality often associated with traditional dialectology. New language-theoretical frameworks form yet another source of inspiration for dialect studies today: typology, cognitive linguistics, discourse analysis and pragmatics have provided fresh perspectives on old problems and opened up completely new lines of research such as cognitive dialectology, folk linguistics, and perceptional dialectology. The articles in this volume arise from The Eleventh International Confer- ence on Methods in Dialectology (Methods XI), which was held from 5 to 9 August 2002, at the University of Joensuu, North Karelia, Finland. The special theme for Methods XI was “Dialects across borders”. This theme was chosen because it accords well with the nature of North Karelia as a historical border area between two states and two different linguistic and cultural traditions. As can be seen from the selection of contributions included in this volume, various kinds of borders exert major influence on linguistic behaviour all over the world. The articles have been grouped according to whether they deal primarily with the linguistic outcomes of political and historical borders be- tween states (Part I); various kinds of social and regional boundaries, including borders in a metaphorical sense, i.e. social barriers and mental or cognitive boundaries (Part II); and finally, boundaries between languages (Part III). In the first five articles, grouped under the heading of “Dialects across political and historical borders”, the main concern is the effects of political and historical borders on dialects. This chapter opens with Peter Auer’s article on “The construction of linguistic borders and the linguistic construction of viii FILPPULA, KLEMOLA, PALANDER & PENTTILÄ borders”. Using the German language area as his example, Auer discusses the complex links between the nation-state and geographical space, on the one hand, and the relationship between these two and dialectal variation (or continua), on the other. An important aspect of geographical space is that it is not merely a physical phenomenon but a mental one. This idea, which Auer adopts from the early twentieth-century sociologist Georg Simmel, explains why lay persons’ ‘ethnodialectological’ perceptions about dialect boundaries may be adjusted by the existence of present or past political borders. As an example, Auer cites the dialect differences between Swabian and Low Alemannic: southwest German informants treat these as different dialects because of their past political separation, although this is not supported by dialectological facts. The former political border between East and West Germany had led to similar ‘cognitive adjustments’ in the minds of West German informants. At a more general level, the state borders between Germany, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, Switzerland, etc. influence people’ ‘cognitive maps’ and lead to the construction of dialect or language boundaries on the basis of political borders. Auer’s contribution is followed by Raphael Berthele’s article on “Static spatial relations in German and Romance: towards a cognitive dialectology of posture verbs and locative adverbials”, which combines in an interesting way methods used in dialectology and language contact studies with a cognitive- linguistic theoretical framework. Focusing on spatial expressions, he examines the mapping of spatial relational concepts onto syntactic structures in different varieties of German across the German–Swiss border and in the neighbouring Romance languages, including French, Italian, and Romansh. The results suggest that, in the expression of spatial relations, Swiss German and Romansh favour verb phrase constructions consisting of a verb followed by locative prepositional phrase + adverb where the adverb can be said to be semantically redundant. By contrast, in Standard High German, Standard Italian and Standard French this PP+ADV pattern is either rare or non-existent. Instead, these languages use the ‘simple’ prepositional phrase construction. Berthele’s explanation for the distinctive behaviour of Swiss German and Romansh rests on adstratal influences between these languages within the complex contact situation in Switzerland. Third in this group, Sandra Clarke and Gunnel Melchers present an interesting survey of a seldom discussed linguistic feature: pulmonic ingressive articulation. Focusing on ingressive discourse particles, the authors argue that the use of this feature is an areal feature that stretches from the eastern Baltic to the Atlantic seaboard of the United States. Clarke and Melchers suggest that the use of pulmonic ingressive discourse particles has diffused via language INTRODUCTION ix contact over this geographical area, and as such provides evidence for cross- linguistic transmission of socially and pragmatically determined features, a phenomenon seldom discussed in the dialectological or contact-linguistic literature. In her study, Larissa Naiditch investigates the details behind the development of the consonant system of Mennonite Low German, or Plautdietsch, which is an insular dialect of German spoken by the religious minority of Mennonites. The speakers of this dialect can at present be found in various parts of Siberia, Kazakhstan, the USA, Mexico and Germany. The migrant past of the Mennonite community comes out in the richness of their dialect, since its consonant system has traces from a number of dialects spoken in the areas where this minority has resided in the course of history. In the final article in Part I, Sali Tagliamonte, Jennifer Smith and Helen Lawrence compare evidence from six corpora representing relic areas in the North of England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Their aim is to find suitable diagnostic features for establishing historical relationships between New and Old World varieties of English. They argue that while verbal -s seems to be a suitable diagnostic feature, NEG/AUX contraction, for to infinitives, and zero adverbs are more problematic for testing similarities and differences in the Old and New World varieties of English. Furthermore, they suggest that examining the variable constraints on linguistic features that are shared across all varieties offers a fruitful way forward for tracking trans-Atlantic connections between varieties of English. Part II (“Dialects across social and regional boundaries”) opens with Dennis R. Preston’s article on “Dialects across internal frontiers: some cognitive boundaries”, in which he discusses some of the ongoing vowel changes in the urban dialects of the northern cities of the U.S.A. Also known as the Northern Cities Chain Shift (NCCS), these changes have been investigated by Preston and his research team from the points of view of dialectology, sociolinguistics and ‘folk linguistics’ (this last one being inspired by social psychology). Preston’s uses the term sociophonetics to describe this kind of combination of different methods. His research focuses on the productive aspect of speech and on what individual factors are behind the NCCS: how adoption of this group of changes correlates with age, commitment to residence in a given locality, and how the ethnic background and social network relationships of the immigrant speaker affect his linguistic accommodation process. Also interesting from the folk-linguistic point of view are his findings on how capable an individual is in imitating a dialect which has a sound system different from his own, and on what impact an adoption of a sound change has on his perceiving of the same change in the speech of others. The effect of