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Investigating geospatial models of the diffusion of morphosyntactic innovations: The Welsh strong second-person singular pronoun chdi

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

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Article

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Abstract

Morphosyntactic dialect variation, once a neglected area of dialect research, has recently witnessed a large growth in interest. Various methods from geospatial data analysis have been applied to morphosyntactic data. To date, the focus has largely been on analysing the distribution of stable patterns of variation. This article extends this work to examine patterns of ongoing change. It uses a body of data from the Syntactic Atlas of Welsh Dialects and the Siarad Corpus of spoken Welsh to examine the innovation and diffusion of a new secondperson singular pronoun, chdi, testing the usefulness of Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) as a method for identifying and modelling patterns of ongoing syntactic change. It is shown that GWR provides plausible models of the diachronic development of changes that are still in progress. Furthermore, it allows us to test whether rates of change are constant across geographical space, allowing us to test whether the Constant Rate Hypothesis (that diffusion of change proceeds at the same rate in different environments) holds between dialects.

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Keywords

47 Language, Communication and Culture, 4704 Linguistics

Journal Title

Journal of Linguistic Geography

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

2049-7547
2049-7547

Volume Title

5

Publisher

Cambridge University Press
Sponsorship
British Academy (MC110579)
This work grew out of research done for my British Academy Mid-career Fellowship MC110579 ‘Syntactic variation in contemporary Welsh’. The fieldwork was funded in part by a Small Research Grant from the Newton Trust. This support is hereby gratefully acknowledged.