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SUMMARY:Dialect syntax as a testbed for models of innovation and change - 
 David Willis (University of Cambridge)
DTSTART:20130516T160000Z
DTEND:20130516T173000Z
UID:TALK41206@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Alison Biggs
DESCRIPTION:Recent years have seen a remarkable revival of interest in the
  syntax of dialects and nonstandard varieties in theoretical syntax. This 
 paper considers how geographical and social distribution of syntactic vari
 ants currently undergoing change can inform our understanding of how synta
 ctic innovations arise and diffuse. While some syntactic innovations are t
 ransparent to speakers and can be copied by adults\, many others are quite
  abstract. Since speakers have no direct access to the internalised gramma
 rs of other speakers\, a reasonable hypothesis is that such innovations sp
 read more readily by being replicated in the newly developing grammars of 
 children during language acquisition. This also raises the possibility tha
 t some syntactic innovations may spread by arising independently during ac
 quisition in the grammars of many individuals. These possibilities will be
  examined and evaluated using data from the first phase of the Syntactic A
 tlas of Welsh Dialects\, focusing on the following recent innovations in W
 elsh:\n\n(i) creation of a new negative modal cau ‘won’t’ and its in
 tegration into the negative-concord system\;\n(ii) the innovation of marki
 ng of long-distance wh-dependencies (e.g. long-distance wh-questions) on e
 very verb in the dependency (e.g. wh-marking on both ‘trying’ and ‘a
 sk’ in ‘What are you trying to ask?’)\;\n(iii) creation of a new sec
 ond person singular pronoun chdi ‘you’ and its spread to new syntactic
  contexts.\n\nThese innovations form a continuum from less to more abstrac
 t which mirrors a similar continuum in their geographical and social distr
 ibution from more to less compact\, plausibly reflecting differences in th
 e mechanisms of innovation.
LOCATION:GR04\, English Faculty\, 9 West Road (Sidgwick Site)
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