“They used to follow Ø river”: The Zero Article in York English

Laura Rupp*, Sali A. Tagliamonte

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to JournalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

Speakers of York English (UK) use a zero article with definite singular nouns (e.g., “They used to follow Ø river”), which is impossible in Standard English. We probe the possibility that this form is a remnant from Old English, when there were no articles as they are currently found in Modern English, rather than a more contemporary development. We trace the diachronic trajectory of the zero article in historical-descriptive grammars and test social and linguistic constraints on its use in York English in a logistic regression analysis. The results show that information structure is a significant predictor of the zero article across all generations of the community and that the zero article is used in the same way as it was used as far back as Old English. However, it exhibits heightened usage among the older and younger generations, exhibiting a U-shaped curve. We suggest that this pattern demonstrates longitudinal maintenance of a conservative feature, which is suppressed in middle-age as the result of social pressures. In this way, this case study adds insight into the fate of dialect features in contemporary speech communities. It also highlights the importance of combining insights from different strands in linguistics for understanding the evolution of syntactic variants like the zero article.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)279-300
Number of pages22
JournalJournal of English Linguistics
Volume47
Issue number4
Early online date6 Sept 2019
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Dec 2019

Funding

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3521-4952 Rupp Laura 1 Tagliamonte Sali A. 2 1 Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the Netherlands 2 University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada Laura Rupp, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1105, Amsterdam, 1081 HV, the Netherlands. Email: l.m.rupp@vu.nl 9 2019 0075424219865933 © The Author(s) 2019 2019 SAGE Publications This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License ( http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages ( https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage ). Speakers of York English (UK) use a zero article with definite singular nouns (e.g., “They used to follow Ø river”), which is impossible in Standard English. We probe the possibility that this form is a remnant from Old English, when there were no articles as they are currently found in Modern English, rather than a more contemporary development. We trace the diachronic trajectory of the zero article in historical-descriptive grammars and test social and linguistic constraints on its use in York English in a logistic regression analysis. The results show that information structure is a significant predictor of the zero article across all generations of the community and that the zero article is used in the same way as it was used as far back as Old English. However, it exhibits heightened usage among the older and younger generations, exhibiting a U-shaped curve. We suggest that this pattern demonstrates longitudinal maintenance of a conservative feature, which is suppressed in middle-age as the result of social pressures. In this way, this case study adds insight into the fate of dialect features in contemporary speech communities. It also highlights the importance of combining insights from different strands in linguistics for understanding the evolution of syntactic variants like the zero article. zero article York English Old and Middle English conservative dialect features information structure age-grading Tagliamonte, Sali A. 1996-1998. Roots of Identity: Variation and Grammaticization in Contemporary British English. Economic and Social Sciences Research Council (ESRC) of Great Britain. Reference #R000221842. edited-state corrected-proof Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. Funding The second author gratefully acknowledges support from the Economic and Social Science Research Council of the United Kingdom for Research Grants 1997-2001. ORCID iD Laura Rupp https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3521-4952

FundersFunder number
Economic and Social Research Council1997-2001

    Keywords

    • age-grading
    • conservative dialect features
    • information structure
    • Old and Middle English
    • York English
    • zero article

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