
- •Contents
- •Figures
- •Tables
- •Contributors
- •Preface
- •Acknowledgements
- •1 Overview
- •1.1 Introduction
- •1.2 The roots of English
- •1.3 Early history: immigration and invasion
- •1.4 Later history: internal migration, emigration, immigration again
- •1.5 The form of historical evidence
- •1.6 The surviving historical texts
- •1.7 Indirect evidence
- •1.8 Why does language change?
- •1.9 Recent and current change
- •2 Phonology and morphology
- •2.1 History, change and variation
- •2.2 The extent of change: ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ history
- •2.3 Tale’s end: a sketch of ModE phonology and morphology
- •2.3.1 Principles
- •2.3.2 ModE vowel inventories
- •2.3.3 ModE consonant inventories
- •2.3.4 Stress
- •2.3.5 Modern English morphology
- •2.4 Old English
- •2.4.1 Time, space and texts
- •2.4.2 The Old English vowels
- •2.4.3 The Old English consonants
- •2.4.4 Stress
- •2.4.5 Old English morphology
- •2.4.5.1 The noun phrase: noun, pronoun and adjective
- •2.4.5.2 The verb
- •2.4.6 Postlude as prelude
- •2.5 The ‘OE/ME transition’ to c.1150
- •2.5.1 The Great Hiatus
- •2.5.2 Phonology: major early changes
- •2.5.2.1 Early quantity adjustments
- •2.5.2.2 The old diphthongs, low vowels and /y( )/
- •2.5.2.3 The new ME diphthongs
- •2.5.2.4 Weak vowel mergers
- •2.5.2.5 The fricative voice contrast
- •2.6.1 The problem of ME spelling
- •2.6.2 Phonology
- •2.6.2.2 ‘Dropping aitches’ and postvocalic /x/
- •2.6.2.4 Stress
- •2.6.3 ME morphology
- •2.6.3.2 The morphology/phonology interaction
- •2.6.3.3 The noun phrase: gender, case and number
- •2.6.3.4 The personal pronoun
- •2.6.3.5 Verb morphology: introduction
- •2.6.3.6 The verb: tense marking
- •2.6.3.7 The verb: person and number
- •2.6.3.8 The verb ‘to be’
- •2.7.1 Introduction
- •2.7.2 Phonology: the Great Vowel Shift
- •2.7.4 English vowel phonology, c.1550–1800
- •2.7.5 English consonant phonology, c.1550–1800
- •2.7.5.1 Loss of postvocalic /r/
- •2.7.5.2 Palatals and palatalisation
- •2.7.5.3 The story of /x/
- •2.7.6 Stress
- •2.7.7 English morphology, c.1550–1800
- •2.7.7.1 Nouns and adjectives
- •2.7.7.2 The personal pronouns
- •2.7.7.3 Pruning luxuriance: ‘anomalous verbs’
- •2.8.1 Preliminary note
- •2.8.2 Progress, regress, stasis and undecidability
- •2.8.2.1 The evolution of Lengthening I
- •2.8.2.2 Lengthening II
- •3 Syntax
- •3.1 Introduction
- •3.2 Internal syntax of the noun phrase
- •3.2.1 The head of the noun phrase
- •3.2.2 Determiners
- •3.3 The verbal group
- •3.3.1 Tense
- •3.3.2 Aspect
- •3.3.3 Mood
- •3.3.4 The story of the modals
- •3.3.5 Voice
- •3.3.6 Rise of do
- •3.3.7 Internal structure of the Aux phrase
- •3.4 Clausal constituents
- •3.4.1 Subjects
- •3.4.2 Objects
- •3.4.3 Impersonal constructions
- •3.4.4 Passive
- •3.4.5 Subordinate clauses
- •3.5 Word order
- •3.5.1 Introduction
- •3.5.2 Developments in the order of subject and verb
- •3.5.3 Developments in the order of object and verb
- •3.5.5 Developments in the position of particles and adverbs
- •3.5.6 Consequences
- •4 Vocabulary
- •4.1 Introduction
- •4.1.1 The function of lexemes
- •4.1.3 Lexical change
- •4.1.4 Lexical structures
- •4.1.5 Principles of word formation
- •4.1.6 Change of meaning
- •4.2 Old English
- •4.2.1 Introduction
- •4.2.4 Word formation
- •4.2.4.1 Noun compounds
- •4.2.4.2 Compound adjectives
- •4.2.4.3 Compound verbs
- •4.2.4.7 Zero derivation
- •4.2.4.8 Nominal derivatives
- •4.2.4.9 Adjectival derivatives
- •4.2.4.10 Verbal derivation
- •4.2.4.11 Adverbs
- •4.2.4.12 The typological status of Old English word formation
- •4.3 Middle English
- •4.3.1 Introduction
- •4.3.2 Borrowing
- •4.3.2.1 Scandinavian
- •4.3.2.2 French
- •4.3.2.3 Latin
- •4.3.3 Word formation
- •4.3.3.1 Compounding
- •4.3.3.4 Zero derivation
- •4.4 Early Modern English
- •4.4.1 Introduction
- •4.4.2 Borrowing
- •4.4.2.1 Latin
- •4.4.2.2 French
- •4.4.2.3 Greek
- •4.4.2.4 Italian
- •4.4.2.5 Spanish
- •4.4.2.6 Other languages
- •4.4.3 Word formation
- •4.4.3.1 Compounding
- •4.5 Modern English
- •4.5.1 Introduction
- •4.5.2 Borrowing
- •4.5.3 Word formation
- •4.6 Conclusion
- •5 Standardisation
- •5.1 Introduction
- •5.2 The rise and development of standard English
- •5.2.1 Selection
- •5.2.2 Acceptance
- •5.2.3 Diffusion
- •5.2.5 Elaboration of function
- •5.2.7 Prescription
- •5.2.8 Conclusion
- •5.3 A general and focussed language?
- •5.3.1 Introduction
- •5.3.2 Spelling
- •5.3.3 Grammar
- •5.3.4 Vocabulary
- •5.3.5 Registers
- •Electric phenomena of Tourmaline
- •5.3.6 Pronunciation
- •5.3.7 Conclusion
- •6 Names
- •6.1 Theoretical preliminaries
- •6.1.1 The status of proper names
- •6.1.2 Namables
- •6.1.3 Properhood and tropes
- •6.2 English onomastics
- •6.2.1 The discipline of English onomastics
- •6.2.2 Source materials for English onomastics
- •6.3 Personal names
- •6.3.1 Preliminaries
- •6.3.2 The earliest English personal names
- •6.3.3 The impact of the Norman Conquest
- •6.3.4 New names of the Renaissance and Reformation
- •6.3.5 The modern period
- •6.3.6 The most recent trends
- •6.3.7 Modern English-language personal names
- •6.4 Surnames
- •6.4.1 The origin of surnames
- •6.4.2 Some problems with surname interpretation
- •6.4.3 Types of surname
- •6.4.4 The linguistic structure of surnames
- •6.4.5 Other languages of English surnames
- •6.4.6 Surnaming since about 1500
- •6.5 Place-names
- •6.5.1 Preliminaries
- •6.5.2 The ethnic and linguistic context of English names
- •6.5.3 The explanation of place-names
- •6.5.4 English-language place-names
- •6.5.5 Place-names and urban history
- •6.5.6 Place-names in languages arriving after English
- •6.6 Conclusion
- •Appendix: abbreviations of English county-names
- •7 English in Britain
- •7.1 Introduction
- •7.2 Old English
- •7.3 Middle English
- •7.4 A Scottish interlude
- •7.5 Early Modern English
- •7.6 Modern English
- •7.7 Other dialects
- •8 English in North America
- •8.1.1 Explorers and settlers meet Native Americans
- •8.1.2 Maintenance and change
- •8.1.3 Waves of immigrant colonists
- •8.1.4 Character of colonial English
- •8.1.5 Regional origins of colonial English
- •8.1.6 Tracing linguistic features to Britain
- •8.2.2 Prescriptivism
- •8.2.3 Lexical borrowings
- •8.3.1 Syntactic patterns in American English and British English
- •8.3.2 Regional patterns in American English
- •8.3.3 Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE)
- •8.3.4 Atlas of North American English (ANAE)
- •8.3.5 Social dialects
- •8.3.5.1 Socioeconomic status
- •8.3.6 Ethnic dialects
- •8.3.6.1 African American English (AAE)
- •8.3.6.2 Latino English
- •8.3.7 English in Canada
- •8.3.8 Social meaning and attitudes
- •8.3.10 The future of North American dialects
- •Appendix: abbreviations of US state-names
- •9 English worldwide
- •9.1 Introduction
- •9.2 The recency of world English
- •9.3 The reasons for the emergence of world English
- •9.3.1 Politics
- •9.3.2 Economics
- •9.3.3 The press
- •9.3.4 Advertising
- •9.3.5 Broadcasting
- •9.3.6 Motion pictures
- •9.3.7 Popular music
- •9.3.8 International travel and safety
- •9.3.9 Education
- •9.3.10 Communications
- •9.4 The future of English as a world language
- •9.5 An English family of languages?
- •Further reading
- •1 Overview
- •2 Phonology and morphology
- •3 Syntax
- •4 Vocabulary
- •5 Standardisation
- •6 Names
- •7 English in Britain
- •8 English in North America
- •9 English worldwide
- •References
- •Index

Standardisation 291
Elizabeth had received an excellent education, and her spelling is equal to that of any educated male writer of her time. In her letters, too, Sarah Fielding (1710–68) spells as well as or perhaps even better than her brother Henry (Tieken-Boon van Ostade, 1998), but then she was a learned woman, despite the fact that she had not enjoyed the kind of formal education normally reserved for men at the time.
All through the late Middle English and early Modern periods there were pronounced regional and social differences in the ability to write and to spell, and much higher percentages of full literacy have been noted for the London region as well as among the highest social ranks – though even here there are exceptions, as in the case of the Clift family, a poor, lower-working-class family from Cornwall, whose members quite exceptionally kept in touch with each other by letter. There is no question about the basic literacy of most of the individual family members, though their spelling is very poor. Even before the youngest member of the family, William (1775–1849), went to London to take up an apprenticeship there, his language comes very close to standard English, and whatever dialectal traits still remained in his language were lost soon after his arrival in the capital (Austin, 1994). In his letters, moreover, there are very few traces of the private spelling system in use at the time, which suggests that he was much influenced in his writing by a self-imposed reading programme.
5.3.3 |
Grammar |
|
By definition, all dialects of a given language are expected to bear a close structural resemblance to each other. Standard English, too, shares most of its grammar with non-standard varieties of English. It does, however, have a number of basic grammatical features that make it different from most regional and social varieties of English around the world. Trudgill (1999a: 125–6) gives a list of eight such features. Four of them concern the morphology and syntax of the verb phrase, three are pronominal, and one has to do with negation. Trudgill’s list will be presented below. The list is, of course, not exhaustive, but it provides a selection of the fixed, codified features of standard English grammar. Some of the processes of focussing and supralocalisation from which they resulted in the early Modern period will be discussed later on in this section. The section will finish with the present day, and look at some less strictly focalised areas of standard English grammar.
The modern standard English verb phrase is characterised by the unusual marking of the third-person singular in the present tense: he goes vs I go. Many other varieties either use zero (I go, you go, he go) or mark all persons (I goes, you goes, he goes). Standard English also has irregular forms of the verb to be both in the present (am, is, are) and the past (was, were). Many other varieties have only one form for the present (e.g. I be, you be) and one for the past (I were, you were). Similarly with other irregular verbs, standard English has different forms for the past and the perfect, which is accompanied with the auxiliary have (I saw vs I have seen). In many non-standard varieties, the tense distinction is often carried

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by the auxiliary (I seen vs I have seen). By contrast, no distinction is made in standard English between the (tensed) forms of the auxiliary do and the main verb do, whereas modal auxiliaries are distinguished from full lexical verbs. Regional dialects typically differentiate between the present-tense forms of the auxiliary (I do, he do) and of the main verb (I does, he does), and similarly between the past-tense forms of the auxiliary (did) and the main verb (done; e.g. You done it, did you?).
The pronominal features that make standard English different from other varieties include the lack of distinction between the second-person singular and plural forms of personal pronouns; you is used for both in the standard. In many traditional dialects either the older distinction between thou and you is maintained or new number distinctions have developed (e.g. you vs youse or y’all). The standard English demonstrative pronoun system has similarly lost a distinction: what is left is a two-way contrast between this (close to the speaker) and that (away from the speaker). A three-way contrast is maintained in many regional varieties, which make a further distinction between that (close to the listener) and yon (away from both speaker and listener). Finally, standard English is less regular than many non-standard varieties in that its reflexive pronouns are derived from two different sources. Forms like myself are based on possessive pronouns, and forms like himself on objective pronouns. Many regional dialects regularly employ the possessive forms (e.g. myself, hisself, theirselves).
One of the socially most marked features on Trudgill’s list (1999a: 125) is the fact that standard English grammar lacks multiple negation (or negative concord), and so does not allow sentences like I don’t want none. Single negation followed by non-assertive indefinites is the only possible alternative in the standard: I don’t want any. Most non-standard varieties of English around the world permit multiple negation, as do many European standard languages, such as Italian and Greek.
It is probably true to say that where new linguistic norms are being established in a language community, the issue will be as complex as the sociolinguistic situation in the community. Recent corpus-based research on early Modern English indicates that the grammatical characteristics of standard English outlined above were typically the result of competing processes of supralocalisation, most of which can be traced to times well before the period of normative grammar in the eighteenth century. Many of the features that supralocalised in the early Modern English period did not have any direct institutional support in their initial stages in the way that public spellings, for instance, did. Neither was institutional support necessarily a guarantee for a feature eventually being codified as part of standard English grammar. This point will be illustrated with the rivalry between the third-person-singular endings -(e)s and -(e)th. Standardisation may therefore be superimposed on supralocal usages established prior to codification, as suggested by J. Milroy (1994: 20).
The rise of many of the future standard features can be traced to densely populated areas. A case in point is the population of London with its variable

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input of immigrants from different parts of the country in the late Middle and early Modern English periods. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, London gained a large number of inhabitants from the midlands. But in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the capital also attracted a sizeable number of immigrants from the northern counties. Sixty per cent of London apprentices, for instance, are estimated to have come from the north in the last decade of the fifteenth century, and nearly 50 per cent in the middle of the sixteenth century. Of all the apprentices migrating to London from England and Wales, the corresponding figures for the midlands were 10 and 20 per cent for these two periods, respectively (Wareing, 1980: 243). The effects of regional mobility and dialect contact can be seen in the grammatical features that were supralocalised throughout the country in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Despite such centres of focussing as the chancery and the printing press, it is evident that a number of those grammatical features which had begun to gain ground in London in the fifteenth century or earlier did not originate in the south. Present-day standard English has forms such as the plural are of the verb be and the third-person-singular -(e)s in the present indicative that go back to northern dialects. The forms current in chancery manuscripts and books printed in London in the fifteenth century were the traditional southern plural form be and third-person -(e)th. However, even these two features travelled different paths: the supralocalisation of are looks like a case of regular dialect diffusion that progressed over the centuries from north to south – a process suggested by the Middle English data charted in A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (LALME; McIntosh et al., 1986). The Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC) indicates that are plurals were more frequent in East Anglia, for instance, than in London for the better part of the sixteenth century, but that they were generalised in the capital, too, in the latter half of the century (Nevalainen, 2000: 348). As is commonly the case with language change in progress, both the incoming and recessive forms may be used by one and the same person in the same context, as is shown by John Johnson, a London merchant, writing to his wife Sabine Johnson in 1545 (the variant forms are marked in boldface):
All your menservauntes have bene of counsaill with hym, for they be of no les opynion, declaring that your breid is not good ynoghe for dogges, and drincke so evill that they cannot drinck it, but ar fayn when they go into the towne to drincke to their dynnars. (John Johnson; CEEC, JOHNSON, 250)
By contrast, the third-person suffix -(e)s looks more like a case of ‘dialecthopping’. In the LALME sources, which cover the period up to 1450, it had not quite reached the central midlands. In the latter half of the fifteenth century the suffix, however, shows up in personal letters in London – well before it appears in East Anglia. It is noteworthy that the early users of -(e)s in London are mostly merchants, mobile people with many weak ties within the community and outside it. Moreover, when -(e)s began to diffuse throughout the country, as the CEEC data suggest, in the latter half of the sixteenth century, the process was headed by

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the City of London, while the high administrators and other representatives of the royal court were slower to adopt it (Nevalainen, 2000: 349–52). This had been the case with are as well. Evidence like this suggests that the processes did not proceed from the higher social ranks to the lower in the south but rather the other way around. Before the processes were completed, mixed usage was the rule even in the highest ranks, as is illustrated by a letter written by Queen Elizabeth I to King James VI of Scotland in 1585:
. . . he knoweth not the prise of my bloude, wiche shuld be spild by bloudy hande of a murtherar, wiche some of your nere-a-kin did graunt. A sore question, you may suppose, but no other act than suche as I am assured he knowes, and therfor I hope he wyl not dare deny you a truthe; (Queen Elizabeth I; CEEC, ROYAL 1, 11)
These findings agree with what we see in such conservative written sources as the 1611 King James Bible and the 1662 version of the Book of Common Prayer. In both texts, -(e)th continues to be the norm in the third-person singular, while be and are both appear in the present indicative plural, though are predominates (Nevalainen, 1987). It is also interesting to note that are was even more frequent in passages that were specifically intended for oral delivery. Both books constituted staple reading at the time, both privately, at home, and publicly, in church. We shall therefore have to reckon with the influence of variable norms even in elements of the core grammar in early Modern English. Consequently, it is possible to observe contending forces in supralocalisation: those from above, originating from various institutional centres of focussing such as the chancery, the church and the printing press, and those from below, operating through everyday spoken interaction and often emanating from less literate speakers. Although are and -(e)s were resisted by influences from above, change from below eventually won the day in both cases.
However, the outcome of the competing forces described here would not necessarily have been predictable at the time. With both -(e)s and are, the processes of supralocalisation were two-way streets between the north and the south: not only were the two new features percolating south, but the southern features -(e)th and be were spreading northwards. This is what one might expect of forms that were part of chancery usage and were adopted by Caxton in his printed books. The southern -(e)th, for instance, could be employed by educated northerners in the sixteenth century when writing to more distant correspondents – presumably in recognition of the southern norm – and -(e)s when writing to their immediate family. The choice of variant may therefore be interpreted as a register indicator for a northerner in the sixteenth century. Despite its appearance in London in the late fifteenth century, to many educated southerners, by contrast, -(e)s does not seem to have presented a major alternative even in the family circle until the second half of the sixteenth century.
When talking about change from below, we should not forget that a third option, the zero form (he go), was also available at the time. It was, however,

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relatively infrequent in the correspondence data, suggesting that it was not a viable alternative for the section of the language community that could write at the time (around 20 per cent of the entire population c.1550 and around 30 per cent c.1650, but with a large amount of regional variation throughout the period; Cressy, 1980). However, some writers could display a three-way contrast in the third-person singular in certain areas of the country. In 1626 Lady Katherine Paston used all three, -(e)s, -(e)th and zero, in the letter to her son cited below. She was a native of East Anglia, where the zero form has been preserved in the local dialect to the present day. Katherine Paston also uses the traditional second- person-singular pronoun thou when addressing her fourteen-year-old son. You had, however, replaced thou in most contexts even within the immediate family as early as the sixteenth century, as is suggested by John Johnson’s letter to his wife cited above. Again we find that neither the regional use of thou nor its prominence in the language of the Authorised Version of the Bible served as models for the evolving supralocal usages.
. . . thy father remembers his loue to the and take thy wrightinge to him very kindly: thy brother remember his louingest loue to the . . . I had thought to haue written to mr Roberts this time. but this sudene Iornye of this mesinger affordethe me not so much time (Lady Katherine Paston; CEEC,
PASTONK, 90).
While both are and -(e)s spread from north to south, research on the letter corpus suggests that most grammatical features that made their way to the supralocal Gemeinsprache during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries diffused from the capital region to the rest of the country. As noted above, London led the process in the last phase of the diffusion of -(e)s in the latter half of the sixteenth century. In a survey of four localities, viz. north, East Anglia, London (the City) and the court, this also appears to have been the case with the personal pronoun form you replacing ye in the subject function and the replacement of multiple negation (not + nobody, nothing, never) with single negation followed by nonassertive indefinites (not + anybody, anything, ever; Nevalainen, 2000: 353–6). The diffusion of you proved to be extremely rapid: it first gained momentum in London in the first decades of the sixteenth century and was completed by the end of the century in all four localities. Multiple negation was also disappearing rapidly in the first half of the sixteenth century but took a much longer time than you, and the process was not fully completed even by the first half of the eighteenth century (Tieken-Boon van Ostade, 1982: 285, note).
These results do not, however, mean that simple generalisations could be made about London English in these two cases either. The use of you as subject diffused in a similar fashion in both London ‘proper’ and the royal court, and found its way to most regional varieties in England (ye is attested only in parts of Northumberland in the Survey of English Dialects; Orton et al., 1998). By contrast, a significant difference emerged in the disappearance of multiple negation between the two London localities, i.e. basically between the City and Westminster. It was

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the court with its professional administrators that took the lead in the process. The letter sources suggest that the rest of London did not catch up with the court until towards the end of the sixteenth century. A passage from a letter composed in 1523 by Thomas Cromwell, the king’s chief minister, is cited below showing the pattern of negation that was later to be codified as part of standard English. It may be contrasted with a passage from the correspondence of Sabine Johnson, a London merchant’s wife, writing to her husband in 1545. The divergent evidence on the spread of you and on the loss of multiple negation supports the view that, in the early Modern English period, supralocal processes did emanate both ‘from above’ and ‘from below’, in terms of social status as well as social awareness.
. . . and wher as I accordinglye haue not in lyke wise remembrid and rescribid it hath bene for that I haue not hade anything to wryt of to your aduauncement. (Thomas Cromwell; CEEC, C R O M W E L L I, 313)
Har answar was that she wold not set har myend to no man tell she was delyvered and choirched [churched], and than as God shall provyde for har; (Sabine Johnson; CEEC, J O H N S O N , 396)
The processes described above were very effective in that they all resulted in morpheme substitutions in the general supralocal variety and, when codified as part of the standard language, became part of a system with no variation in form: standard English retains only one form in the third-person-singular present indicative, one second-person pronoun in the subject position, and so on. As noted in Section 5.2.7, language standardisation is, however, never implemented with the same rigour as the standardisation of weights and measures. Even today, after the codification of standard English in grammar books and dictionaries, a fair amount of variability is allowed in the non-localisable standard. There are, for instance, as many as three relative markers for expressing the object relation with non-human nouns, that, which and zero: the book that/which/Ø I bought. They all go back to Middle English, or even earlier, but underwent some modifications in early Modern English, which include the ‘dehumanisation’ of which as relative, i.e. the restriction of which to non-human antecedents (cf. the Lord’s Prayer in the 1611 Bible: Our father which art in heauen). Similarly, indefinite pronouns with human reference come in two series in standard English, with both -one and -body (Anyone/anybody home?). The -man series was eliminated in the early Modern English period; what remains of it are a few fixed expressions such as no-man’s-land (Raumolin-Brunberg, 1998). Standard English also marks future time by several auxiliaries and semi-auxiliaries such as shall, will, be going to and its variant form gonna. The roots of be going to (as in I’m going to go there tomorrow) can be traced to late Middle English, but the semi-auxiliary did not gain ground until the seventeenth century (Rissanen, 1999a: 223).
Which variant is chosen in each case largely depends on register, the way language is used in different situational contexts. A comparison of spoken and written registers will show that the relative pronoun which is more typical of

Standardisation 297
writing than of speech, while the opposite is the case with that and the zero relativiser. Similarly, forms in -body are preferred in speech to those in -one, and be going to and will to shall. The zero relativiser, -body pronouns and be going to all go back to earlier oral and speech-like registers and have retained these connotations up to the present day. But regional variation also appears in the use of these forms. In American English will is regularly used as a future auxiliary with I and we (Quirk et al., 1985: 227–8). As noted in Section 5.2.7, it has become acceptable in most kinds of British English, too, but shall used to be the prescribed form until the last quarter of the twentieth century. Corpus studies also indicate that be going to is more frequent in American than in British English in both fiction and conversation; American English similarly prefers pronouns in -body to those in -one, and that to which in restrictive relative clauses even in written contexts (Biber et al., 1999: 353, 487–8, 616). In sum, in these cases the more colloquial forms are more common in American than in British English.
We also find that there are forms and structures that are acceptable in speech but not allowed in most kinds of writing. They include the use of the interrogative subject pronoun who as an object form (who did you talk to? vs whom did you talk to?). This use of who as an object form has spread throughout the Englishspeaking world and is no longer confined to casual conversation (Biber et al., 1999: 214–15). Probably due to the fact that it has had a bad press with prescriptivists, it is one of those casual spoken-language features that was never generalised in writing. Although it is commonly attested in early Modern English, for instance, in Shakespeare (O Lord sir, who do you meane? in 1 Henry IV, II.iv), it was probably too slow in spreading high and far enough before codification set in (Schneider, 1992). But there are signs suggesting that the status of who may be slowly changing. It is accepted as ‘legitimate modern practice’ in influential works like The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage (Burchfield, 1996: 848), which is critically concerned only with those cases in which the objective form whom is ungrammatically used for the subjective who (. . . far more hostile to Diana whom she believes betrayed the Prince of Wales; Independent Mag., 1993).
Although the object who may be more acceptable to normative grammarians and educated speakers now than it was in the past, there are a number of grammatical features in conversational language along the standard vs non-standard line that continue to divide speaker reactions. Spoken norms are, however, not only less focussed than written standard norms, but they have also become an object of extensive linguistic research much more recently. One thing that appears from the descriptive grammars of present-day usage based on electronic corpora is that many non-standard spoken-language features, too, have supralocalised worldwide. Some of the ways in which the grammar of written standard English may differ from casual conversation will be discussed below. The illustrations are all drawn from the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (LGSWE; Biber et al., 1999). The differences are both morphological and syntactic.
A set of features specific to casual conversation can be found in pronominal forms and verbal inflections. They coincide in subject–verb concord. In order

298 T E R T T U N E VA L A I N E N A N D I N G R I D T I E K E N - B O O N VA N O S TA D E
Table 5.1 Concord patterns in conversation (from Biber et al., 1999: 191)
Standard form |
Non-standard (NS) form |
% of use of NS form |
|
|
|
I was |
I were |
c.5 |
you were |
you was |
c.10 |
she was |
she were |
c.10 |
they were |
they was |
c.5 |
I say |
I says |
c.50 |
you say |
you says |
less than 2 |
he doesn’t |
he don’t |
c.40 |
they don’t |
they doesn’t |
less than 2 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
to see that the grammar of conversation often displays variants not admitted in writing, we may consider the findings reported in LGSWE on the use of standard and vernacular concord patterns. They are based on a corpus of roughly four million words of British English and two and a half million words of American English (Biber et al., 1999: 25, 29). Table 5.1 presents the distribution of some typical concord patterns across the conversational data, all recorded after 1980.
Some of the findings may be explained by the fact that the corpus also includes some children and teenagers, whose language may not be as close to the standard as middle-aged people’s usage. I says and he don’t are, however, so frequent that they call for further comment. LGSWE classifies forms like this as parts of larger chunks where individual elements are not independently chosen. Although not mainstream variants in the past, both forms can be traced to earlier English, and are frequent in present-day regional varieties (Cheshire et al., 1993: 79–81; Trudgill, 1999a: 125–6). Shared by non-standard and standard speakers alike, some casual speech features may therefore have wider distribution globally than their written standard equivalents. Partly for this reason some writers on the topic prefer to talk about ‘general English’, which excludes obvious local and regional dialects but has a wider distribution than standard English in that it accommodates spoken language and more or less stigmatised grammatical forms such as he don’t (Gramley, 2001: 2–3).
Biber’s chunking explanation appears particularly appropriate in the case of colloquial contractions like there’s, here’s and where’s followed by plural subjects. The LGSWE database provides examples like: Gary, there’s apples if you want one; here’s your shoes; where’s your tapes? In fact, there’s preceding a plural subject occurs more frequently in casual conversation than there followed by a plural verb. That we have a continuum here that crosses the boundary between speech and writing can be seen with singular forms of be followed by coordinated noun phrases. Where a singular noun phrase immediately follows the verb, singular concord is in fact the more frequent choice with coordinated phrases in both speech and writing (When he left an hour later there was no shrug and not