Syntactic Variation: Evidence from the Scottish Corpus of Text and Speech

Abstract

This chapter serves as an introduction for students and researchers who wish to use corpora to explore syntactic variation in Scottish speech. The linguistic resources available for such an exploration have substantially increased in the past decade, and so the ways in which we can engage with such evidence have correspondingly altered. In the past, both experienced and novice scholars needed to engage in labour-intensive fieldwork to gather data in the communities under study, finding suitable informants, making recordings of more or less spontaneous discourse, and finally, transcribing, analysing and discussing the results. Such studies seldom moved beyond the bounds of a particular area, such as Pollner’s (1985) study of Livingston or Macaulay’s (1991) discussion of Ayrshire. Those wishing to give a broader overview of Scottish speech (e.g. Miller and Brown 1982; Miller 1993, 2003; Beal 1997) drew on such bounded studies, or at least those to which they had access, and they supplemented them with their own research. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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