Hardie, Andrew and McEnery, Tony (2003) -Subjunctive in British Rural Dialects: Marrying Corpus and Questionnaire Data. Comput. Humanit., 37 (2): 2. pp. 205-228.
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
This paper examines the were-subjunctive in British rural dialects in the light of data from two sources: the Survey of English Dialects (SED) questionnaire, and the Leeds Corpus of English Dialect (LCED), consisting of transcribed recordings made at the same time as the data was gathered for the questionnaire. We begin by surveying previous work on the subjunctive in general, and the were-subjunctive in dialect grammar in particular (section 1), culminating in a discussion of the SED data on the were-subjunctive. We then move on in section 2 to pose two hypotheses: firstly that the SED does not provide a complete picture of this phenomenon and thus corpus data may be of use enriching it; secondly a “null” hypothesis that no were-subjunctive is consistently marked in the dialects in question. We then look at the methodology and data used (section 3), describing the source of our data, the LCED. We also note some potential difficulties (3.1) before moving on to discuss the choice of an area of England to examine (3.2) and of texts to analyse (3.3). In section 3.4 we describe the mark-up scheme used in the analysis of the texts, and in 3.5 the process of annotation and extraction of results form the texts. These results are presented in section 4. We consider the corpus data in relation to the questionnaire data (4.1), and to our two hypotheses (4.2 and 4.3). In our Conclusion (section 5) we summarise the implications of this study and consider some possible future routes of enquiry into the were-subjunctive in the rural dialects of England.