Relativism and Universalism in Linguistics - Fachbereich 10 ...

54 Sections
Sgall, P., et al. (1986), The Meaning of the Sentence in Its Semantic and Pragmatic Aspects,
Prague, Academia.
Notes:
* The research reported in this paper was supported by the projects 1ET101120503, GA-UK
352/2005 and GD201/05/H014.
1 See http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/pdt2.0/
2 By means of the attribute indeftype, the German pronoun nichts will be represented ‘lemma
was + negat’. A similar treatment of indefinite and negative pronouns as of two subtypes of
the same entity was introduced also in the MultiNet knowledge representation system
(Helbig, 2001).
Explaining the my vs. me variation in Lancashire dialect:
a usage-based grammar.
Siewierska, Anna / Hollmann, Willem
Lancaster University / Lancaster University
a.siewierska@lancaster.ac.uk;w.hollmann@lancaster.ac.uk
In current spoken English the first person singular possessor used in substantival possession
occurs in two main variants: a full and a reduced variant. The full variant, which we will refer
to as my, features the dyphthong [ai]. The reduced variant, which we will refer to as the mevariant,
has several phonetic realizations, with the reduced vowel schwa, a short [i] or a long
[i]. According to Wales (1996:14), though the first two of the reduced variants occur in
standard spoken English, on the whole the reduced variants are characteristic of dialectal
speech, where they co-occur with the full variant.
To the best of our knowledge the factors underlying the use of the full and reduced variants of
the first singular possessor in dialectal speech have not yet been the subject of investigation.
In this paper we set out to shed some light on the issue by considering the distribution of the
two variants in Lancashire dialect, where the dominant form of the reduced variant is [mi].
Our investigation is based on a corpus of conversations, originating from the North West
Sound Archive (see also Siewierska & Hollmann 2006). Our analysis of the distribution of the
my and me-variants in the speech of 20 speakers reveals that the reduced variant is strongly
favoured by constructions with inherently possessed nominals, especially kin terms and body
parts, as opposed to those with non-inherently possessed ones.
Within the context of the usage-based model of grammar (see e.g. Bybee 1985, Croft 2000,
Kemmer & Barlow 2000 and Tomasello 2003) an explanation for such a distribution of the
two variants may be sought in the high token frequency of the possessor-noun strings in
question, while the cognitive saliency of kin terms and body parts may be a factor as well. We
will present the case for each of the two lines of explanation, and show how the factor of
token frequency should probably be complemented by reference to the entrenchment — hence
productivity — of certain (semantically coherent) possessive-noun schemas.
References
Bybee, Joan L. 1985. Morphology: a study into the relation between meaning and form.
Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Croft, William. 2000. Explaining language change. London: Longman.
Kemmer, Suzanne & Michael Barlow. 2000. Introduction: a usage-based conception of
language. In Michael Barlow & Suzanne Kemmer, eds., Usage-based models of
language, vii-xxviii. Stanford: CSLI.