3. Grammar.
3.1 Nouns.
The definite article.
- There isn’t the definite article before “same”: ’Tis same’s I always told ’ee”.
- The of-phrase “the… of” is of ten used instead of the possessive pronoun (e.g. “the head of him “instead of” his head”)
The plural form of a noun.
- In many cases -s (es) can be added for several times:
e.g. steps [’steps∂z] (South Som.)
- in some cases [n] is heard at the end of the word:
e.g. keys [ki:n] (Wil.)
cows [kain] (Dev.)
bottles [botln] (South-W. Dev.)
primroses [prımr zn] (Dev.)
- but sometimes [s] is heard in the words ended with “-n”
e.g. oxen [ ksnz] (Western Som.)
rushes [rıksnz] (Dev.)
- some nouns have the same form in the singular and in the plural:
e.g. chicken - chickens [t∫ık] (Som.)
pipe - pipes [paıp] (Som.)
- sometimes the plural form of the noun is used insted of the singular form:
a house [auzn] (Southern Wil.)
3.2 Gender.
The full characteristic of Gender in South-Western English I’d like to base on the part of the article by Paddock. Paddock uses the historical lebel “Wessex” to describe the countries of South-Western England.
3.2.1 Gender making in Wessex-type English.
“It is usually claimed that English nouns lost their grammatical gender during the historical period called Middle English, roughly 1100-1500. But this claim needs some qualification. What actually happened during the Middle English period was that more overt gender marking of English nouns gave way to more covert marking. As in Lyons (1968:281-8), the term ‘gender’ is used here to refer to morphosyntactic classes of nouns. It is true that the loss of adjective concord in Middle English made gender marking less overt; but Modern English still retains some determiner concord which allows us to classify nouns (Christophersen and Sandved 1969). In addition, Modern English (ModE), like Old English (OE) and Middle English (ME), possesses pronominal distinctions which enable us to classify nouns.
We can distinguish at least three distinctly different types of gender marking along the continuum from most overt to most covert. The most overt involves the marking of gender in the morphology of the noun itself, as in Swahili (Lyons 1968:284-6). Near the middle of the overt-covert continuum we could place the marking of gender in adnominals such as adjectives and determiners. At or near the covert end of the scale we find the marking of gender in pronominal systems.
During all three main historical stages of the English language (OE, ME, ModE) one has been able to assign nouns to three syntactic classes called MASCULINE, FEMININE and NEUTER. However, throughout the recorded history of English this three-way gender marking has become less and less overt. In OE all three types of gender marking were present. But even in OE the intrinsic marking (by noun inflections) was often ambiguous in that it gave more information about noun declension (ie paradigm class) than about gender (ie concord class). The least ambiguous marking of gender in OE was provided by the adnominals traditionally called demonstratives and definite articles. In addition, gender ‘discord’ sometimes occurred in OE, in that the intrinsic gender marking (if any) and the adnominal marking, on the one hand, did not always agree with the gender of the pronominal, on the other hand. Standard ME underwent the loss of a three-way gender distinction in the morphology of both the nominals and the adnominals. This meant that Standard ModE nouns were left with only the most covert type of three-way gender marking, that of the pronominals. Hence we can assign a Standard ModE noun to the gender class MASCULINE, FEMININE or NEUTER by depending only on whether it selects he, she or it respectively as its proform.
During the ME and Early ModE periods the south-western (here called Wessex-type) dialects of England diverged from Standard English in their developments of adnominal and pronominal subsystems. In particular, the demonstratives of Standard English lost all trace of gender marking, whereas in south-western dialects their OE three-way distinction of MASCULINE/FEMININE/NEUTER developed into a two-way MASS/COUNT distinction which has survived in some Wessex-type dialects of Late ModE. The result in Wessex was that the two-way distinction in adnominals such as demonstratives and indefinites came into partial conflict with the three-way distinction in pronominals”. (№18, p.31-32)
- Nowadays in the south-western dialects the pronouns ‘he’ / ‘she’ are used instead of a noun:
e.g. My ooman put her bonnet there last year, and the birds laid their eggs in him. (= it)
Wurs my shovel? I aa got’im; him’s her. (= Where is my shovel? I’ve got it. That’s it.)
- In the south-western dialects objects are divided into two categories:
1) countable nouns (a tool, a tree), and the pronouns ‘he’ / ‘she’ are used with them
2) uncountable nouns (water, dust), and the pronoun ‘it’ is used with them.
The pronoun ‘he’ is used towards women.
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