Standardisation in Early Modern Norwich: A case-study of the third-person singular indicative present tense markers

Standardisation is often explained as a linear process in which Standard English is said to have emerged from one ancestor dialect, namely the Chancery Dialect. This concept based on the SAD hypothesis has recently been challenged by various scholars who discovered linguistic features from language varieties outside of London in modern-day Standard English. However, the exact impact that other dialect areas had on shaping the standard is still relatively unclear. As a result, contemporary investigations have adopted a view that examines language change 'from below', as Standard English seems to be the result of a hybrid of features which originate from different locations. In order to shed more light on the rise of supralocal varieties and how their features diffused, the EMST project focuses on urban vernaculars of major regional centres separately in the period between 1400-1700. Nonetheless, in terms of urban vernaculars, Norwich, the urban centre of East Anglia has remained...Show moreStandardisation is often explained as a linear process in which Standard English is said to have emerged from one ancestor dialect, namely the Chancery Dialect. This concept based on the SAD hypothesis has recently been challenged by various scholars who discovered linguistic features from language varieties outside of London in modern-day Standard English. However, the exact impact that other dialect areas had on shaping the standard is still relatively unclear. As a result, contemporary investigations have adopted a view that examines language change 'from below', as Standard English seems to be the result of a hybrid of features which originate from different locations. In order to shed more light on the rise of supralocal varieties and how their features diffused, the EMST project focuses on urban vernaculars of major regional centres separately in the period between 1400-1700. Nonetheless, in terms of urban vernaculars, Norwich, the urban centre of East Anglia has remained fairly unexplored. Consequently, the current dissertation will conduct a corpus study of sixteenth and seventeenth-century letter-type texts on how linguistic features in Norwich changed during the rise of supralocal varieties focusing on the third-person singular present tense indicative specifically. This specific marker is chosen due to it being one of the most notable linguistic features of the Norwich dialect and consisted of three possible markings during the Middle English period: -th, -s and zero. The findings show that the presence of the zero form, along with the earlier adopted -th suffix, accounted for slower adoption of the standardised -s in the Norwich dialect. Eventually, the -s variant is taken up in the Norwich variety, but the zero form remains in use among lower-class citizens, which is still the case in modern Norwich dialect.Show less

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Standardisation in Early Modern Norwich: A case-study of the third-person singular indicative present tense markers