Reading Working Papers in Linguistics 4 (2000) - The University of ...

P. KERSWILL & A. WILLIAMS
The ‘grammar salience test’ was administered as a questionnaire during
group discussions with the adolescents. Sentences containing examples of 40
non-standard features were presented in printed form (following the practice
adopted in Cheshire, Edwards & Whittle 1989/1993), and the subjects had to
write down whether they thought the constructions could be heard in their
town.
Table 4 shows the recognition scores for some of these features. Below
each score, the working-class subjects’ actual usage is given, expressed as the
percentage use of the non-standard form in the interviews. Four main patterns
emerge. Pattern 1 shows that, for a number of features, medium or high usage
among working-class speakers goes with a high recognition rate among both
working-class and middle-class judges. Pattern 2 shows that the same is true
for features particular to individual towns: non-standard done in the southern
towns and non-standard was in Hull. Conversely, Pattern 3 shows that low
linguistic scores can correspond to relatively low recognition rates.
The results for Patterns 1–3 are in line with the assumption, stated
earlier, that grammatical features are likely to be salient because their variants
are distinct. However, there are other patterns which suggest that factors other
than distinctness are at work. Pattern 4 suggests that some strongly localised
features can receive a high recognition rate, even when their absolute
frequencies are low. Both the Hull zero definite article and the Reading nonstandard
present tense -s are decreasing in frequency, yet they remain highly
salient. Furthermore, within Patterns 2 and 3 we find a mismatch between
recognition rates for the two groups of judges. Thus, in Hull, middle-class
adolescents believed that preterite done was a characteristic of local speech
(showing this by their ‘recognition’ rate of 100 per cent), while the linguistic
score (at 8 per cent) demonstrated this was not the case – did is the local form.
It is as if these judges are stereotyping local non-standard speech, attributing
an otherwise widespread and stigmatised feature to Hull when it is in fact
largely absent there. Conversely, in Reading, middle-class judges fail to
recognise the present tense marker -s. These results suggest that, even within
a single town, there can be a lack of shared knowledge of local norms, a fact
which is very much in line with the results from a ‘dialect recognition’
experiment reported in Kerswill & Williams (forthcoming). It follows that
salience, however defined and however caused, will be different for different
social groups.
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