Investigating Variation and Change in Late Modern English Dialects: The Salamanca Corpus

Abstract

This chapter examines the Late Modern English element of the SC. On the one hand, it describes the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century materials so far available, providing an overview of their distribution as regards text type, chronology and varieties documented. Our aim is to outline the major challenges that this compilation may entail, including the dearth of data for specific varieties and the difficulties behind the interpretation of the evidence attested in some texts. On the other hand, this chapter highlights that, despite those pitfalls and widespread criticism about its use for linguistic research (e.g. Schneider 2013), the data preserved in dialect writing and lexicography offers useful insight into the history of forms that remain little explored, while it can prove beneficial in reconstructing linguistic ideas about dialects over time. To do so, we summarise selected case studies that illustrate the potential contribution of the SC to the study of variation and change in Late Modern English dialects, including periphrastic DO in south-western dialects and the enregisterment of Lancashire speech (see Ruano-García 2020, forthcoming).