11/11/2023 0 Comments Atlas drvos vSince speakers have no direct access to the internalized grammars of others, a reasonable hypothesis is that such innovations spread rapidly by being replicated anew in the newly developing grammars of children during language acquisition (“multiple reactuation”) that is, each new child makes the same parsing “error” that led to the first innovation, encouraged in this misparse by the absence of evidence to the contrary in the speech of children and adults who have already incorporated the change into their grammars. While some syntactic innovations are transparent to speakers and can be copied by adults, many others are quite abstract, mediated by changes to feature values on functional items. Specifically, it considers how the geographical distribution of syntactic variants currently undergoing change can inform our understanding of how syntactic innovations arise and diffuse. 1 This paper introduces the Syntactic Atlas of Welsh Dialects ( SAWD) project in the context of such research, and shows how it can be used to address theoretical questions in syntax and language change. The re-emergence of interest in the application of techniques from geospatial data analysis to address theoretical questions in dialect syntax has provided us with new tools to investigate long-established questions of how linguistic innovations, specifically morphosyntactic ones, arise and diffuse through geographical space. This analysis is consistent with the dialect patterns and interspeaker implicational hierarchies found in the data. A formal analysis is sketched out, treating the change as moving along a pathway of feature change with semantic features shifting to interpretable syntactic features and then to uninterpretable syntactic ones. On the basis of this, it is argued that the diffuse geographical patterns attested are best interpreted as evidence of multiple innovation across a wide area, with new speakers re-implementing the innovation (“multiple reactuation”). The atlas fieldwork establishes current patterns of dialect variation, showing significant age variation indicative of change in progress and the rise of negative concord in this context. This item is a relatively recent innovation, and it is currently undergoing increasing integration into the negative concord system. This paper introduces the pilot project for the Syntactic Atlas of Welsh Dialects, setting out the procedures for data collection and sketching a case study for one variable within the dataset, namely the patterns of negative concord found with the negative modal cau ‘won’t’.
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