Nonstandard periphrastic DO and verbal -s in the south west of England

Abstract

Abstract This paper aims to investigate the distribution of periphrastic DO and verbal -s in the south west of England using the FRED-s corpus. The data supports the earlier reported suggestion that the two features are in complementary distribution with regard to region: in counties where one feature is favoured, the other feature is disfavoured and speakers who use one feature tend not to use the other feature. However, there is some overlap as some speakers in the FRED-s corpus use both features, giving support to an idea, earlier proposed, of a transitory area in which a possible change takes place where speakers drop the use of DO and adopt verbal -s. Furthermore, the data shows an interesting tendency where periphrastic DO favours the habitual verbal aspect, whereas verbal -s favours the punctual verbal aspect. These findings could indicate that the two features have a different grammatical function. However, the overall frequency with which these two features occur is very low and seems to suggest that they are disappearing. Moreover, their use seems to be limited to short originally Germanic words, suggesting that the two features only occur in contexts where they were originally used, but are not productive.