LANGUAGE FORM AND LINGUISTIC VARIATION AMSTERDAM STUDIES IN THE THEORY AND HISTORY OF LINGUISTIC SCIENCE General Editor E.F. KONRAD KOERNER (University of Ottawa) Series IV - CURRENT ISSUES IN LINGUISTIC THEORY Advisory Editorial Board Henning Andersen (Copenhagen); Raimo Anttila (Los Angeles) Tomaz V.Gamkrelidze (Tiflis);Hans-Heinrich Lieb (Berlin) J.Peter Maher (Chicago);Ernst Pulgram (Ann Arbor, Mich.) E.Wyn Roberts (Vancouver, B.C.);Danny Steinberg (Honolulu) Volume 15 John Anderson (ed.) LANGUAGE FORM AND LINGUISTIC VARIATION Papers dedicated to Angus McIntosh LANGUAGE FORM AND LINGUISTIC VARIATION Papers dedicated to Angus Mcintosh edited by John Anderson (University of Edinburgh) AMSTERDAM / JOHN BENJAMINS B.V. 1982 © Copyright 1982 - John Benjamins B.V. ISSN 0304 0763 / ISBN 90 272 3506 6 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. DEDICATORY PREFACE It can seldom have happened that a scholar has heen honoured on his retirement by two festschrifts. But in the case of Angus McIntosh just one would have seemed insufficient. Another volume ( So Meny People Longages and Tonges, edited by Michael Benskin and M.L. Samuels) pays tribute to the importance of his work in dialectology and, of course, Middle English dialectology in particular. However, many of his colleagues felt that a volume dedicated entirely to dialect studies, would, inevitably, fail to reflect the vast range of his interests. For before he was Professor of English Language at the University of Edinburgh Angus McIntosh was Professor of English Language and General Linguistics, and, as such, responsible for introducing the teaching of linguistics into that university. And despite the fact that for the last twenty years his work has been mainly devoted to the Atlas of the Dialects of Later Middle English he has still (incredibly) found time to write articles on subjects ranging from graphemics to stylistics, from place names to Modern English syntax. Nearly all these papers break new ground. All of them are distinguished by the originality of the approach and a sensitivity to language that, unfortunately, is found all too rarely among linguists, And all of them are written in that lucid and witty style that characterizes everything that he writes, and which helps to make him such a stimulating teacher and colleague. It is to the author of these papers that the scholars who have contributed to this volume dedicate their contribution with gratitude and affection. James Peter Thorne. CONTENTS Dedicatory Preface v Fred Cassidy: Lemmatization -- The Case of 'Catalpa' 1 J.C. Catford: Marking and Frequency in the English Verb 11 Bridget Cusack: Complements and Humours 29 R.M.W. Dixon: Problems in Dyirbal Dialectology 43 Colin J. Ewen: The Phonological Representation of the Welsh Mutations 75 Jan Firbas: Has every Sentence a Theme and a Rheme? 97 Jacek Fisiak: Isophones or Isographs? A Problem in Historical Dialec­ tology 117 M.A.K. Halliday: The De-automization of Meaning: From Priestley's 'An I nspector Calls' 129 Eric Hamp: 'Thwaite' .161 A.A. Hill: Rhymes and Reasons, the Practice of Two Poets .169 Richard M. Hogg: Two Geminate Consonants in Old English? ...187 Donald Macaulay: Borrow, Calque and Switch: The Law of the English Frontier. 203 Norman Macleod: The Stylistic Analysis of Poetic Texts: Owen's 'Futility' and Davie's 'The Garden Party' 239 Bruce Mitchell: Old Enlish Man 'One': Two Notes 277 Wayne O'Neil: Simplifying the Grammar of English 285 Ivan Poldauf: Verbal Aspect: A Slavonic-English Comparison 307 John Pride: Communicative Needs in the Learning and Use of English 321 Randolph Quirk and Jan Rusiecki: Supplementing Corpus Elicitation.379 VIII CONTENTS Fred C. Robinson: Latin for Old English in Anglo-Saxon Manu­ scripts .395 Vivian Salmon: Wh- and Yes/No Questions: Charles Butler's Grammar (1633) and the History of a Linguistic Concept 401 Barbara M.H. Strang: Some Aspects of the History of the Be+ing Con- stuction 427 James Peter Thorne: A Note on the Indefinite Article 475 Josef Vachek: Written Language as a Heterogeneous System 485 LEMMATIZATION - THE CASE OF "CATALPA" FRED CASSIDY In making a dictionary of a language which has a standard orthography, establishing the forms and sequences of lemmata is at worst a minor problem. Each word has its established spelling; alternatives are few; and new words are not admitted until they have settled down from the first ad hoc attempts to spell them to a more considered form, Except for foreign words of very different sound, analogies are quickly found on which new words can be spelled, More serious problems arise when the sources are oral, or chiefly oral, and when the object is not to set a standi ard, but to represent the variants which are in actual use, It is the nature of spoken forms to develop many variants: on what principles is the lexicographer to choose the right lemma or lemm- ata under which to collect and present all the variants in his word-list? The problem was faced, of course, in the Scottish National Dictionary,1 when the editors had to deal not only with written forms which represented conflicting ways of rendering oral forms, but also from the dialectal diversity of the oral forms them- selves. As the introduction states, with a hint of patience tried, "It is seldom that a word is spelled only one way in Scots." (xiv). To put some order into the diversity, the more usual form or