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COPYRIGHT 2002 Adam Mickiewicz University Press
ABSTRACT
Altogether six maps taken from The computer developed linguistic atlas of England (Viereck and Ramisch 1991, 1997) serve to demonstrate peculiarities of pronominal usage in English dialects. In the area of personal pronouns, phenomena such as pronoun exchange, gender diffusion and the lack of formal gender distinctions are discussed. Moreover, the question is addressed why the weak form of us survives today as against the strong forms in me and we. As regards possessives, anaphoric and deictic functions are differentiated and it is shown that subject-referring possessive pronouns once were reflexive possessives in English, as they were or are in other languages now.
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In her book The English language in modern times (since 1400) Margaret Schlauch also has a chapter on "Modern English dialects and their literary uses" which contains insightful observations on quite a number of aspects. As regards personal pronominal usage we find the following passage in the section on "Southern English dialects":
The pronouns preserve traces of O[ld] E[nglish] forms elsewhere replaced by others: the archaic thou and ye as in Biblical usage, and also en (-m by assimilation) for the masculine dative -- accusative, em (never them) for the plural of the same case. Personal pronouns are used to refer to inanimate things. Very striking is the use of nominative forms for emphatic accusatives. This is said to be so consistent that it might be more accurate to say that all pronouns have two forms in the accusative: one for emphasis, coinciding with the nominative, and a separate one developed from historical oblique forms, now serving in unemphatic constructions. Barnes illustrates the difference by these expressions: Gi'e en the knife; Gi'e us the wheat; but: Gi'e the money to I (we) not to he (they).
(Schlauch 1959: 165f.).
The phenomena that came later to be called pronoun exchange and gender diffusion had thus already been observed by Schlauch. (1)
Pronominal usage, of course, also varies in the Standard language, not, however, to the same extent as in the dialects. In Standard English:
Subjective personal pronouns function as subject and sometimes as subject complement; objective personal pronouns as object, prepositional complement, and sometimes as subject complement ... He was late, It was he [but also] It was him ... Although the prescriptive grammar tradition stipulates the subjective case form, the objective case form is normally felt to be the natural one, particularly in informal style. However, the choice occurs chiefly in this restricted and infrequent construction with final pronouns, ie in 'object territory' ... After but, except, than, and as ... there is [also] vacillation ....
The prescriptive bias for the subjective forms may account for hypercorrect uses of them, as in between you and I ... Let you and I do it! He says she saw you and I last night, which are not uncommon in informal conversation.
(Quirk et al. 1972: 208 and 210 f.)
I would like to present some maps from our computer developed linguistic Atlas of England (Viereck and Ramisch 1991, 1997) for which the data were taken from Harold Orton's Survey of English Dialects, published between 1962 and 1971.
The first three maps (or, for reasons of space, rather the legends to the maps) relate to gender diffusion, namely "If you want to know how heavy a thing is, what do you do? weigh it" (Figure 1), "Jack wants to have Tommy's ball and says to him, not: Keep it!, but ... Give it me" (Figure 2) and "Before your wife brings you the broth, she is certain to have [gesticulate] ... tasted it" (Figure 3). The answers are on the one hand quite similar, yet on the other there are also noticeable differences. On all three legends it occurs most often to be followed by en, em, (2) him and them. A look at the frequencies of occurrence of these last-mentioned...
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