Scottish Standard English - phonological and morphosyntactic features and their variation

• Applicants: Professorin Dr. Ulrike Gut; Professor Dr. Ole Schützler
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: from 2017 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 385934505

The linguistic situation in Scotland is complex including Scottish Gaelic, a language spoken primarily in the Hebrides by about 1.1 % of the Scottish population, and two English-based languages: Scots and Scottish Standard English (SSE). The grammar of Scottish Standard English is often assumed to be largely shared with the standard variety of English spoken in the rest of Britain and its defining features are usually described in the area of phonetics and phonology. Descriptions of SSE syntax and morphology typically refer to its characteristic features as borrowings from Scots, just as differences in SSE usage across regional and social speaker groups are typically explained by differing degrees of "concessions to Scots". This propensity to explain all differences between SSE grammar and that of other English standard varieties with borrowing from Scots has so far effectively precluded the description of the grammatical features that 'belong' to and characterise SSE and that show regional and register variation within the variety. It is the aim of the project to describe the grammatical and phonological characteristics of Scottish Standard English as well as their range of (co-)variability across registers. To this end, the one-million-word corpus (ICE Scotland; including various registers) that is currently being compiled by the two applicants, will first be enhanced with automatically created and manually checked phonemic annotations (using the tool WebMAUS) and automatically created and manually checked POS tagging (using the TreeTagger). Subsequently, the fully annotated corpus of SSE will be analysed for the segmental features described to occur in SSE out of the 179 phonetic-phonological features listed by Schneider (2004: 1131-1137) that were devised to allow a large-scale comparison of world-wide varieties of English as well as the 53 morphosyntactic features out of the 235 features used in eWAVE for the comparison of world-wide varieties of English that were attested to occur in SSE. For all features, the regional distribution, usage by the two genders and the variation across registers/text types will be analysed. Thus, for the first time, the phonological and morphosyntactic features of SSE and their variation will be described comprehensively and based on empirical data. This will allow the comparison of SSE with the other world-wide varieties of English.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Cooperation Partner: Professor Dr. Manfred Krug