T-to-R and the Northern Subject Rule: questionnaire-based spatial, social and structural linguistics

Abstract

Accents and dialects of English and Scots in Britain have been under active investigation for many decades, as reported through theSurvey of English Dialects(Ortonet al. 1962–71) and theLinguistic Atlas of Scotland(Matheret al. 1975–86), Wells’ three-volume compendium (1982), and a host of detailed studies of individual varieties. There are also welcome recent signs of the reintegration of variation data into theoretical discussion (see Henry 2002, Cornips & Corrigan 2005a and Trousdale & Adger 2007 for morphosyntax, as well as Anttila 2002 and Coetzee & Pater 2011 for phonology). Nonetheless, the precise structural, geolinguistic and sociolinguistic patterning of many features of vernacular Englishes in the UK is still largely unknown.