TAMING THE VERNACULAR: SOME REPERCUSSIONS FOR THE STUDY OF SYNTATIC VARIATION AND SPOKEN GRAMMAR

Abstract

The paper discusses two areas of research that are usually treated separately: the analysis of syntactic variation, and the analysis of the grammar of spoken English. Variation analysis has focused more on phonetic and phonological variation than on syntactic variation. Partly because phonological variables tend to occur more frequently than syntactic variables. This is turn, together with the fact variable syntactic forms usually have specific pragmatic functions in conversation, means that syntactic variables do not usually distinguish the social distribution of a variable syntactic construction can throw light on the nature of its pragmatic function, and sometimes helps us to discover more about the social aspects of language use. This is illustrated here with the example of subject- verb concord in topic-introducing structures in spoken English, and with a brief discussion of lone who clauses in spoken English. The paper also argues, however, that both variationist analysis and the analysis of spoken grammar have been affected by our susceptibility to focus on features that have become salient to us a result of the processes of standardisation of a language, so that features that are unaffected by these processes are often overlooked. This is illustrated by considering the nature of the variables that are conventionally analysed in social dialectology, such as the current analysis of dialect levelling in three English towns.