Relativisation on the North Sea Litoral
Patricia Poussa (ed.)
University of Umeå
This volume brings together new papers on relative clause formation by leading scholars from all branches of North Sea Germanic. The historical development of the relative system in written texts is covered in the papers by Platzack on the Scandinavian languages, Hoekstra on Frisian, Van der Wal on Dutch, Rösler on Middle Low German (Hansa texts) and Nevalainen & Raumolin-Brunberg on Early Modern English (Corpus of Early English Correspondence). Cross-language comparisons can be made in the emergence of wh- relative pronouns in all these written languages. Thus this collection fills a long-felt want, enabling one to place the English historical developments within their North Sea Germanic context.
Several ground-breaking papers are based on tape-recorded surveys, some geolinguistic, some sociolinguistic in approach. Peitsara's analysis of 1970's Suffolk materials throws new light on the traditional rural dialect of southern East Anglia (poorly covered by the Survey of English Dialects), while for five other English dialect areas Tagliamonte, using Labovian methodology, reports on the present tendency for the relative marker that to be generalised as a supraregional relative marker. Methodological problems with Germanic that (old, new, or both?) and with nonstandard English what are discussed, with benefit of hindsight, in the Editor's Introduction.
Contents
Introduction
Patricia Poussa
North Sea Relatives: Introduction
Part I: North Sea Germanic: Historical and Geographical Variation
Marijke Van der Wal
Relativisation in the History of Dutch: Major Shift or Lexical Change?
Christine Johansson
The Possessive Relativizers Whose and Of Which in Middle English
Irmtraud Rösler
Relative Clauses in Low German (15th-16th century)
Jarich Hoekstra
Relativisation in Frisian
Christer Platzack
Relativization in the Germanic Languages, with Particular Emphasis on Scandinavian
Fredrik Karlsson & Kirk P. H. Sullivan
Relativization in the Regional Dialect of Swedish Spoken in Burträsk
Terttu Nevalainen & Helena Raumolin-Brunberg
The Rise of the Relative Who in Early Modern English
Part II: British Dialects: Variation in Tape-recorded Corpora
Joan C. Beal & Karen P. Corrigan
Relatives in Tyneside and Northumbrian English
Christer Geisler
Relativization in Ulster English
Sali Tagliamonte
Variation and Change in the British Relative Marker System
Kirsti Peitsara
Relativizers in the Suffolk Dialect
Nadine Van den Eynden Morpeth
Relativisers in the Southwest of England
ISBN 9783895863660. LINCOM Studies in Language Typology 07. 200pp. 2002.
