Rowan Stewart
(QMUL) -
2024-25 Students
rowan.stewart@qmul.ac.uk
Theoretical implications of syntactic dialect variation
My project focuses on the intersection between theoretical syntax and dialectology. I analyse and inspect the encoding of dialect variation into the grammar of speakers of minority dialects, and what this means for syntactic analysis. I ask two key questions: what are the theoretical implications for modelling a language’s syntax in the face of dialect variation, and what syntactic theory best models fine-grained dialect variation? Furthermore, how productive, in that they are used by the speaker in natural contexts, are standard syntactic constructions in the grammar of dialect speakers, and what competition, if any, occurs between dialect and standard forms? Primary Supervisor: Professor David Adger |