Speakers of the variety of English spoken in York (YrkE) use three vernacular determiners: a zero article (Christophersen 1939), a reduced determiner (Wright 1905:259), and a complex demonstrative (e.g., Bernstein 1997). The determiners are illustrated in the examples (1a-c), respectively, from the York English Corpus (YEC) (Tagliamonte 1996-1998). The reduced determiner is a determiner form without a vowel and is known to occur in a range of different variants, for example [t] (e.g., Jones 1999). The complex demonstrative consists of a demonstrative, a locative here or there, and a noun.
(1)a They used to follow Ø river I think did bombers. (mmichaels, 67)
(1)b And we’d been in t’ pub for two clock. (rjones, 50)
(1)c You - know what these here police are. (rfielding, 87)
In work with Sali Tagliamonte, we propose that the three YrkE determiners can be traced back to the history of English and reflect particular stages in the development of the English determiner system. In their survival they appear to show three processes of change: (1) the null determiner shows absence of change in fact and constitutes evidence that a form can have a stable use over centuries (Rupp & Tagliamonte 2019); (2) the reduced determiner shows recycling whereby younger generations of speakers have reassumed the form for identity expression (Dubois & Horvath 1999; Tagliamonte & Roeder 2009); and (3) the complex demonstrative shows decline and provides a window on the way in which a form may undergo grammaticalization or specialization on the way to apparent loss (Traugott 1995; Schilling-Estes & Wolfram 1999; Jankowski & Tagliamonte 2017; Rupp & Tagliamonte 2017). I will argue that these processes can only be identified from a joined perspective of historical linguistics, language variation and change, discourse pragmatics, and generative syntax.
References
Bernstein, Judy B. 1997. Demonstratives and reinforcers in Romance and Germanic languages. Lingua 102, 87–113.
Christophersen, Paul. 1939. The articles: A study of their theory and use in English. Copenhagen: Einar Munksgaard.
Dubois, Sylvie & Barbara Horvath. 1999. When the music changes, you change too: Gender and language change in Cajun English. Language Variation and Change 11(3). 287-313.
Jankowski, Bridget & Sali A. Tagliamonte. 2017. A lost Canadian dialect: The Ottawa Valley 1975-2013. In Tanja Säily, Arja Nurmi, Minna Palander-Collin & Anita Auer (eds.), Historical linguistics: A festschrift for Terttu Nevalainen on the occasion of her 65th birthday, 239-274. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Jones, Mark, J. 1999. The phonology of definite article reduction. In Clive Upton & Katie Wales (eds.), Dialectal variation in English. Proceedings of the Harold Orton Centenary Conference 1998. Leeds Studies in English 30, 103–121.
Rupp, Laura & Sali A. Tagliamonte. 2017. ‘This here town: evidence for the development of the English determiner system from a vernacular demonstrative construction in York English.’ English Language and Linguistics. [printed in March 2019, ELL23: 81–103].
Rupp, Laura & Sali A. Tagliamonte. 2019. ‘“They used to follow ∅ river”: The zero article in York English.’ Journal of English Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0075424219865933.
Schilling-Estes, Nathalie & Walt Wolfram. 1999. Alternative models of dialect death: dissipation versus concentration. Language 75, 486–521.
Tagliamonte, Sali A. 1996-1998. Roots of Identity: Variation and Grammaticization in Contemporary British English. Economic and Social Sciences Research Council (ESRC) of Great Britain.
Tagliamonte, Sali A. & Rebecca V. Roeder. 2009. Variation in the English definite article: Socio-historical linguistics in t'speech community. Journal of Sociolinguistics 13(4). 435-471.
Traugott, Elizabeth C. 1995. Subjectification in grammaticalization. In Dieter Stein & Suzan Wright (eds.), Subjectivity and subjectivisation in language, 31–54. Cambridge: CUP.
Wright, Joseph. 1905. The English dialect grammar. Oxford: Henry Frowde.
