Negation in Non-Standard British English

Despite the advances of radio and television and increasing mobility and urbanization, spoken English is by no means becoming more like the written standard. English dialect grammar, however, is still a new and relatively undeveloped area of research, and most studies to date are either restricted regionally or based on impressionistic statements. This volume provides an empirical study of the field of non-standard negation across Great Britain. Based on the British National Corpus, this book investigates a range of morphosyntactic features of negation that can be found in everyday spoken language. Employing the relatively new method of investigating dialect grammar with the help of large corpora, it provides in-depth analyses of contradiction types, mulitple negation, ain't , third-person don't , and wasn't/weren't. This book also utilizes a new theoretical frame: the framework of functional typology. Linking variation in one language with variation between languages in this way provides a powerful instrument for the interpretation of dialect data. A comparison of non-standard patterns with cross-linguistics trends and regularities suggests functional explanations that account for