No taming the vernacular! Insights from the relatives in northern Britain

In this article we conduct a quantitative analysis of the markers used to introduce relative clauses in three vernacular varieties of English in Britain. In each variety there is a surprisingly low frequency of WH words in subject relatives and negligible use in nonsubject relatives, suggesting that the WH forms have not yet penetrated the respective vernaculars. Variable rule analyses of the multiple factors conditioning that and zero relative markers reveal that the varieties pattern quite similarly with respect to significance of factors. For the zero variant, there is a favoring effect of (1) sentence structure and (2) indefinite antecedents; however there are dialect specific differences in some nuances of the constraint ranking of factors. On the other hand, the use of zero is also highly correlated with contextual constraints relating to surface level processing, that is, clause length, as well as clause complexity, across all communities. Taken together, these findings provide evidence for both dialect specific and universal constraints on relative marker use, which can be used to further elucidate the task of conducting broad cross-community comparisons. The results also provide support for an important distinction in linguistic change – those changes that are imposed from the outside (like the WH relative markers) and those that arise from within (like that and zero relative markers) proceed very differently in mainstream as compared to peripheral varieties.The first author acknowledges with gratitude the generous support of the Economic and Social Research Council of the United Kingdom (the ESRC) for research grant #R000239097, Back to the Roots: The Legacy of British Dialects. We thank our colleagues Karen Corrigan and Anthony Warner for stimulating and insightful discussion of this article, which greatly improved the final version it has taken. We also are indebted to Jonathan Hope, Terttu Nevalainen, Ronald Macaulay, Helena Raumolin-Brunberg, Suzanne Romaine, and James Walker for comments, as well as two anonymous reviewers. We dedicate this article to the “northerners” in Cumnock, Culleybackey, Maryport, and Portavogie who took the time to share their stories with us, providing this legacy of British dialects for the future.