Syntactic Variation and Unconscious Linguistic Change

By examining adjectival relative clauses in the dialect of Dorset, in the Southwest of England, this volume illustrates how contemporary British dialects can contribute to our understanding of (unconscious) linguistic change. The analysis, which is based upon tape-recorded interviews with numerous informants, as well as written dialect imitations extracted from a variety of sources, shows that dialectal relativization is governed by an intricate network of both linguistic and non-linguistic (i.e. regional, social, stylistic) factors. The corpus has been incorporated in its entirety and perfectly lends itself for further dialectological research.