harris john syntactic variation and dialect divergence

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Syntactic Variation and Dialect Divergence Author(s): John Harris Source: Journal of Linguistics, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Sep., 1984), pp. 303-327Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4175742Accessed: 03-08-2015 08:35 UTC

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J. Linguistics 20 (i984), 303-327. Printed in Great Britain

Syntactic variation and dialect divergence JOHN HARRIS

University of Sheffield

(Received 20 March I984)

INTRODUCTION

The problem of how to model syntactic variation has received much attention over the last few years.1 Some of the well-known difficulties stem from attempts to extend to the syntactic level quantitative techniques which were originally developed to handle phonological variation. In particular, the application of the sociolinguistic variable model to the syntactic domain has come in for a good deal of criticism (e.g. Lavandera, I978; Romaine, I98i). According to the classical Labovian formulation, all variants of a given variable must share 'sameness of (cognitive) meaning' (1972a: 271). Con- siderable doubts have been voiced about whether this requirement can consistently be met at the syntactic level. The problem is thrown into even greater relief when it comes to studying the sort of syntactic variation that occurs in situations of interface between standard and vernacular varieties. It has not generally been noted that assuming direct semantic equivalence between standard and nonstandard syntactic variants presupposes that they are embedded in structurally identical grammars. That is, apparently alternating standard and vernacular forms are simply treated as distinct surface realizations of the same underlying structure. The justification for this approach rests squarely on the belief that it is possible to offer a structural definition of the intuitively available concept of 'dialects of the same language'. According to what we might call the PANLECTAL IDENTITY HYPOTHESIS, dialects of a single language are considered to share a common grammatical 'core' and differ only in matters of low-level realization (e.g. Agard, I971). Variation arising out of interface between dialects that are allegedly related in this way is thus describable in terms of variable rules which operate at low levels of realization.

Recent work on syntactic variation has demonstrated that, if the notion of the panlectal grammar does correspond to any empirical reality at all, its scope of application is sharply constrained (e.g. Labov, 1973; Trudgill, I982).

[i] This article is a version of a paper that was delivered at the Economic and Social Research Council workshop Varieties of British English Syntax held at the University of Salford, 8-io January I984. (The workshop's brief was extended to include Hiberno-English.) I am grateful to Lesley Milroy, Jim Milroy and Nigel Gotteri for their comments on parts of an earlier draft.

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As the body of research on nonstandard syntax increases, it is becoming more and more evident that a good deal of dialect diversity at this level cannot simply be attributed to low-level differences. Rather it points to the conclusion that deep-seated structural divergences exist between varieties which are intuitively felt to be dialects of the same language. As examples of non-standard English features which diverge radically from standard patterns, we may cite: 'remote perfect' been and habitual be in American Black English Vernacular (Labov, 1973); peculiarities of relativization (e.g. 'shadow' pronouns, omis- sion of subject relatives) and double modals in Scottish English (Miller & Brown, I98o); and the distinction between main-verb and auxiliary do in some English English varieties (Cheshire, 1982). (See Edwards et al., (1983) for a useful summary of some non-standard syntactic patterns in Old World dialects of English.)

A comparison of the standard English (StE) and Hiberno-English (HE) verb-phrases provides a clear illustration of the dangers that are inherent in the use of the sociolinguistic variable to describe syntactic variation in conditions of interface between standard and vernacular varieties. Of necessity the model encourages an atomistic view of variation, whereby pairs of apparently alternating standard and nonstandard forms are studied in isolation from other forms in the relevant grammatical subsystem. This 'worm's eye' approach encourages the impression that differences between the standard and a particular vernacular are merely superficial and tends to obscure whatever deep-seated divergences there might exist between the two varieties. In contrast, the likelihood of radical structural differences coming to light is increased as the angle of observation is increased to encompass the wider grammatical subsystems in which the apparently alternating forms are embedded. What I am advocating here, in other words, is that the principles of what used to be known as 'structural dialectology' (Weinreich, 1954) be carried into the domain of syntax. I will exemplify the value of this approach by examining a particular HE construction which is sometimes assumed to be a nonstandard variant of the standard perfect. The incorrectness of this assumption becomes evident if we consider the two forms in the wider context of the tense-aspect systems of StE and basic HE. A deep-seated structural mismatch can be shown to exist between the two varieties in this area of the grammar. A review of the historical background to this state of affairs reveals that the points at which HE diverges radically from standard patterns owe at least as much to earlier English input as to interference from Irish Gaelic. The indications are that the HE verb-phrase retains features of Early Modern English structure which also survive to a lesser extent in other modern English vernaculars. The implication is that the nature and extent of the structural mismatches discussed here are not exclusive reflections of contact-induced change but are likely to be typical of situations of interface between StE and 'mainstream', non-contact vernaculars.

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I. HIBERNO-ENGLISH AND THE IRISH SUBSTRATUM

The starting point for the vast majority of studies on HE is the assumption that the dialect is shot through with traces of an Irish Gaelic substratum. Indeed, anyone with even a passing interest in Irish and HE cannot help being struck by a number of obvious structural parallels between them. The effects of Irish interference are, not surprisingly, most discernible in parts of Ireland with a high incidence of bilingualism as well as in areas where Irish has only recently ceased to be spoken as a first language. However, many of the nonstandard HE features which bear the most obvious marks of Irish interference tend to disappear wherever increased urbanization promotes a severing of links with the use of Irish. By way of illustration, we may note the following HE constructions, which are restricted for the most part to conservative rural speech in predominantly or residually bilingual areas.

(I) Anyone wasn't at home. Ni raibh aon duine sa bhaile. neg BE + past ANY PERSON IN-THE HOME

(2) He fell and him crossing the bridge. Thit se agus e ag dul thar an droichead. FALL + past HE AND HE AT GO OVER THE BRIDGE

Sentence (I) exemplifies the failure of negative attraction, the rule which moves a negative particle leftward from preverbal position to be incorporated with subject indeterminate any, ever or either (*Anyone doesn't go -+ No-one goes). (Incidentally, examples such as (i) contradict Labov's assertion that negative attraction is a 'general and compelling rule of English which is equally binding on all dialects' (1973: 47).) The failure of this rule in some types of HE is in all likelihood due to Irish interference. The form of indeterminate subjects in Irish (e.g. aon duine or duine ar bith 'anyone') remains constant across both affirmative and negative contexts. The negative verbal particle ni/nior always retains a preverbal position and never undergoes attraction to an indeterminate subject. Sentence (2) illustrates the use of subordinating and with subject pronoun and ing-participle which is characteristic of conservative HE in the west of Ireland. The construction is apparently unique to HE and is clearly a calque on the Irish adverbial structure agus + subject pronoun + ag + verbal noun.

I wish to concentrate here on nonstandard types of HE which are characteristic of areas where Irish is no longer spoken as a first language. I shall justify this emphasis by seeking to show that many of the general remarks which can be made about syntactic variation in such varieties are widely applicable to 'mainstream', non-contact vernaculars as well. The majority of writers insist that the most saliently nonstandard features which are to be found in the speech of HE monolinguals continue to manifest the effects of an earlier Irish substratum. In some cases the evidence in favour

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of this position is quite strong. In some others, however, the exclusiveness of Irish input is questionable. As our knowledge of English vernaculars increases (particularly as a result of recent sociolinguistic research), it becomes more evident that many of the features in question have a wide distribution in nonstandard varieties spoken outside Ireland. One area of HE syntax that illustrates the combination of Irish interference and general nonstandard English features quite clearly is the tense-aspect system.

2. TENSE AND ASPECT IN HIBERNO-ENGLISH

In StE, grammaticalization of the habitual versus non-habitual distinction is restricted to past-tense forms (used to be versus was/were). HE is similar to several New World Black English or English-based varieties in having the distinction extended to present-tense forms as well. Habitual be in HE is realized as finite be/be's or as do/does plus non-finite be:

(3) Well, there be's games in it and there be's basketball, darts and all. (Speaker 49A/ I, Derrygonnelly, Fermanagh.)

(4) He's the kind of person that you would never know when he was drunk, but he does be, if you know what I mean. (Maura D., Belfast.)2

Note in passing that Example (4) provides a nice illustration of the distinction between non-habitual is and habitual does be. With verbs other than be, it is possible to recognize at least two types of habitual: an iterative perfective and an iterative imperfective. The former indicates a plurality of events, each of which is viewed as a self-contained whole. It is realized as do plus infinitive, as in:

(5) Well, when you put them on to the barrow you do have them in heaps and then you do spread them and turn them over and all. (49A/I, Derrygonnelly, Fermanagh.)

where it may be noted that habitual do in HE is quite different from the emphatic use of periphrastic do in modern StE. The iterative imperfective in HE indicates a plurality of events, each of which is viewed with regard to its internal structure (e.g. duration). It is typically formed by habitual be plus an ing-participle, as in:

(6) They be shooting and fishing out at the Forestry lakes. (49A/i, Derrygonnelly, Fermanagh.)

[21 Unless otherwise stated, all the referenced examples in this and the following sections are drawn from the tapes of the Social Science Research Council projects Language variety and speech community in Belfast, Sociolinguistic variation and linguistic change in Belfast and the Tape-Recorded Survey of Hiberno-English Speech. I am grateful to Mr M. V. Barry of Queen's University Belfast for granting me access to the Survey's tape archives.

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Henry (1957: 170) notes a third type of habitual, which he refers to as 'frequentative durative', formed by do be plus an ing-participle, e.g. They do be fighting among other (= StE '.. . among each other'). For many types of HE, however, this does not appear to exist as an autonomous category. In these cases do be V+ing structures only occur in interrogative or negative sentences as a result of do-support operating on the iterative imperfective, as in:

(7) Q: What kind of jobs do they be doing? (Caitlin G., Tyrone.) A: Well, they be planting trees and they be digging drains and they be

sowing manure. (49 A/ I, Derrygonnelly, Fermanagh.)

In the majority of conservative HE dialects it is thus possible to recognize at least the following four-way distinction among present-tense forms: simple (he goes), progressive (he's going), iterative perfective (he does go) and iterative imperfective (he be's going).

Another area where the HE verb-phrase diverges quite radically from that of StE lies in the scope of time reference usually covered in standard dialects by the perfect. The latter rarely occurs in basic HE vernacular. Instead, HE speakers have available to them a number of forms which roughly speaking do the work of the StE perfect. One of the most saliently nonstandard of these is a construction which, following Greene (1979), we may refer to neutrally as Pll. This only occurs in transitive sentences where it resembles the StE perfect but for the fact that the EN-participle is placed after the direct object:

(8) She's nearly her course finished. (Sammy S., Belfast.)

(P II bears more than a passing resemblance to the Satzklammer of Germanic (cf. German Sie hat den Film gesehen), but most writers on the subject prefer to attribute its constituent order to Irish interference. I take this up in Section 5.) The resemblance to the StE perfect has encouraged several writers to assume that PII is merely a variant of the standard form, differing from it only superficially in terms of word order (e.g. Joyce, I9Io; Sullivan, 1976). If this assumption were correct, the standard and the nonstandard forms could be said to be distinct surface realizations of the same underlying structure. In this area of the grammar, HE would differ from StE only in the presence of a late transformational rule which would shift an EN-participle to the right of an object noun-phrase. In a study of the variation that takes place between the perfect and P 11 in less conservative types of HE, this analysis would allow us to treat the two forms as variants of the same syntactic variable. However, the impression of direct equivalence between the StE perfect and HE Pll is largely an illusion created by viewing the two forms in isolation. As soon as we pan the comparison out to view the forms in their wider systemic contexts, the extent of their incompatibility becomes evident.

For the purposes of comparing StE and HE in this area of the grammar,

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I shall find it convenient to refer to four temporal and aspectual distinctions which are among the most important that are coded in StE by the perfect. These are the following, (together with StE examples):

Resultative: past event with present relevance (Peggy has swallowed an orange).

Indefinite anterior: event(s) occurring at (an) unspecified point(s) in a period leading up to the present (ive only seen ET once).

Hot-news past: event located at a point that is separated from but temporally close to the present (Al has just arrived).

Extended-now: situation initiated in the past and persisting into the present (I've known Sam for some time).3 In contrast to standard usage, HE speakers can and often do make these four distinctions grammatically transparent.

One of the resultative forms in HE is the transitive P II construction already referred to. There is no intransitive conterpart formed with have. Instead, there is a statal resultative formed by be plus an EN-participle, which is restricted to mutative verbs such as leave, change, die, go, as in

(g) I went back to school and all, but I'm not too long left. (Gerry M., Belfast).

In addition to these two resultatives, HE has a hot-news perfect which, again following Greene (I979), we may refer to as PI. This is formed by be plus after plus an ing-participle, e.g.:

(io) A young man's only after getting shot out there4. (StE 'A young man has just got shot...') (Tilly S., Belfast.)

StE generally marks the distinction between indefinite (present) anterior and past anterior time ('then time') by using the perfect for the former and the preterite for the latter. Compare i've seen ET twice since I came to London with I saw ET twice when I was in London. This distinction is often not grammaticalized in HE, the preterite being used in both cases. It is left to temporal adverbials or the wider discourse context to supply the difference in meaning. In the following example, the preterite is used to encode present anterior time, a context in which standard British English would require the perfect:

(i i) I never saw a gun in my life nor never saw a gun fired. (Maggie H., Belfast.)

[3] The terms hot news and extended now are taken from McCawley (1971) and McCoard (1978) respectively.

[4] It should be pointed out that HE PI does not have the meaning 'want/intend to' that a superficially similar construction has in some types of colloquial British English. An example of the latter usage occurs in He wants to cut up to I,500 jobs - that's what he's after doing which I recorded from a Tyneside speaker.

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To signal extended-now time, StE uses either a simple or 'expanded' perfect. HE speakers, in contrast, may use an equivalent present form:

(I2) I know his family all me life. (StE 'I've known. . .') (Bernadette O'H., Lurgan, Armagh.)

(I3) FW: Have you always lived here? A: We're living here seventeen years. (Mick C., Belfast.)

One of the nonstandard forms just discussed appears to be exclusive to HE and its derivative North American dialects: hot-news PI. The others are FORMALLY identical to ones that occur in English generally. What distinguishes HE from standard English English with regard to the latter is the different USES to which the forms are put. Functional differentiation of this sort is by no means restricted to a comparison of StE with HE; it appears to be symptomatic of much more widespread inter-dialectal differences. For example, there is a good deal of variation throughout the English-speaking world in the use of the perfect form vis-a'-vis the preterite. In American varieties, both standard and nonstandard, the preterite often occurs in resultative contexts where standard British English would usually require the perfect. (Compare British Have you eaten yet? with American Did you eat yet?) American English is like HE in often preferring the preterite as a means of expressing indefinite anterior time, where again British speakers would be more likely to use the perfect. Idiomatic uses of the preterite in such contexts are, however, occasionally to be found in British English, particularly in collocation with always, ever or never, e.g. I always said (= 'have said') that he would end up in jail (Leech & Svartvik 1975: 67).

Neither is P 11 restricted to HE. In standard and related dialects, structures of the type have NP EN-participle are most often to be interpreted as causatives or 'indirect passives' (e.g. I had a book stolen = 'I got somebody to steal a book for me' or 'A book of mine was stolen'). Nevertheless, completive interpretations with subject as agent are sometimes possible ('I succeeded in stealing a book'). (See Chomsky's (I965: 21-2) discussion of this example.) The latter reading is not particularly common in standard English English, but Kirchner reports it as being more usual in American and Scottish English (1952: 402 ff.). It may be that, with respect to resultative Pll, HE merely exhibits a quantitative difference in relation to those dialects that also have the construction. Impressionistically at least, we can say that P 11 is much more frequent in HE than in other dialects and can occur with a much greater range of lexical verbs. (For example I have the tickets booked seems a possible standard sentence; HE I have it pronounced wrong is decidedly less likely in StE.)

It appears then that the HE tense-aspect system shares at least some of its nonstandard characteristics with other modern dialects of English. In fact, it can be shown that some of these features were also present in earlier

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varieties of standard English English. In Section 5 I examine the possible historical implications of these inter-dialectal similarities.

3. PANLECTAL IDENTITY?

This is an appropriate point to look a little more closely at the panlectal identity hypothesis and consider the implications that a comparison of the StE and HE verb-phrases has for it. It has been a widely held assumption, at least among theoretical linguists and some traditional dialectologists, that the intuitive notion 'dialects of the same language' can be given an explicit structural definition. According to this view, and despite occasional warnings in the literature (e.g. Wolff, I964; Berdan, 1977), mutual intelligibility between speakers of different varieties is considered to confirm the existence of a common grammatical 'core' underlying all dialects of a single language. The following claim is typical: 'there appears to be in general an underlying identity of syntactic patternings in all forms of English' (Wakelin, 1977: 125). It is within the general framework of transformational generative grammar that the panlectal identity hypothesis has been most clearly articulated. The conventional generative wisdom is that dialects of the same language share the same set of underlying representations and differ only in the organization of low-level rules. Underlying identity manifests itself at the syntactic level as a shared body of phrase-structure rules and at the phonological level as a shared body of lexical representations (see for example Agard, 1971; Bailey, 1973). Dialect divergence manifests itself in the selective addition, loss, simplification, reordering, or other modification of late transformational or phonological rules (see King, I969: ch. 3). Explicit applications of this concept appear for example in Chomsky & Halle (I968: 49, 54) and Troike (I969) (for English), Brown (1972) (for Luganda), and Newton (1972) (for modern Greek). At least initially, the model seemed to be an attractive one for sociolinguists who were grappling with the theoretical and methodological problems raised by dialect variation. By the late I960s and early 1970S questions concerning structural relationships among dialects centred on whether particular varieties had 'the same or different deep structure' (e.g. Loflin, I967; Labov, 1972b: ch. 2). In fact, the whole argument about the status of American Black English Vernacular vis-a'-vis standard and other varieties of English seemed to hinge on this issue.

It has not generally been noted that the Labovian variable rule model, which is predicated upon some sort of modified version of transformational generative grammar, is also to a large extent parasitic on a generative interpretation of the panlectal identity hypothesis. This point is particularly problematical when it comes to applying the model to cases of syntactic variation in situations of interface between standard and vernacular varieties. The problem is related to the whole issue of whether or not the Labovian requirement that variants of a single sociolinguistic variable should share

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'sameness of (cognitive) meaning' (I972 a: 27 I) can be met consistently at the syntactic level (see the discussions in Lavandera, 1978; Labov, 1978; Romaine, I98I). The semantic equivalence requirement, as Romaine points out (I98I: io), relies heavily on the classical conception of generative grammar. One of the things the latter allows us to say is that superficially distinct sentences may be derived from the same underlying structure. This has encouraged some sociolinguists to assume that particular alternating standard and vernacular forms are normally to be regarded as simply different surface realizations of the same underlying structure. Recognizing the direct structural equivalence of such forms rests on the assumption that they are embedded in underlyingly identical grammars. Presumably this means that, in acquiring superposed standard forms, a vernacular speaker simply maps them on to structures that are already available in his native grammar. According to this view, variation of this sort can be adequately modelled in terms of variable rules which operate at relatively low levels of realization.

When we apply this model to a comparison of the StE and HE verb-phrases, it soon becomes clear that the degree of divergence cannot reflect mere differences in the organization of low-level rules. For a start, HE requires the habitual vs. non-habitual distinction to be fully coded in its verbal group rule(s), something which is not true of StE. The relationship between the StE perfect and the corresponding range of verb-forms and constructions in HE is a rather more complicated matter.

I mentioned in the last section that some writers have tended to treat HE P11 and the StE perfect as different realizations of the same underlying structure. Since both forms occur variably in less conservative types of HE, this assumption would qualify them for treatment as variants of a single sociolinguistic variable. In fact, on the Belfast sociolinguistic project our initial attempts at quantifying their distribution were based on just this premise. It very soon became clear, however, that the use of P II by Belfast Vernacular speakers was not at all like that of the perfect form in StE. In fact there are certain characteristics of PII which point to the conclusion that it differs radically from the StE perfect in at least two respects. First, it is not a fully grammaticalized tense-aspect category, as the StE perfect is, but is probably best analysed as a complex construction consisting of a main have clause and a subjoined clause containing an EN-participle, i.e. something along the lines of

(14) [I have [my dinner eaten]]

According to this interpretation, P 11 has an object complement structure that is parallel to one frequently found with verbs such as want, need, get, e.g.:

(I5) [I want [this wall painted]]

This analysis also suggests a close structural relationship between PII with

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possessive/experiential have and the sort of object complement structures that occur with causative, benefactive or 'indirect passive' have in StE, e.g.:

(i6) [I had [a book stolen]]

Second, P II does not have the actional meaning of the StE perfect but appears rather to be a statal resultative. That is, rather than focusing on a past event that gives rise to a present state, as the StE perfect can, PII refers primarily to the state itself. A sentence like (I4) can thus be interpreted as 'I have my dinner in a state of having been eaten'. We need only note here a few of the factors that support these conclusions (see Harris (I983a) for a fuller discussion).

One of the syntactic considerations that favour the analysis of Pll as a complex construction is its behaviour under negation. Depending on the position of the negative particle, the scope of negation can be either the whole construction (as in (17)) or the subjoined clause alone (as in (i8)).

(17) I haven't even it made yet. (Irene D., Belfast.) (i8) I've a loaf not touched. (Cilla C., Belfast.)

As far as the semantic differences between PIT and the StE perfect are concerned, we can point to certain severe co-occurrence restrictions which apply to the HE construction but not to the StE form. For example, the occurrence of temporal adverbials in P IT sentences is restricted to those whose scope of time reference is compatible with the present state that is referred to in the construction, e.g. already, now, yet:

(I9) They've that million pound probably spent already now. (Maiire B., Belfast.)

Adverbials which focus on an anterior event are excluded from P IT sentences. The StE perfect is different in this respect, since it permits the occurrence of adverbials which refer to events in indefinite anterior time, e.g.:

(20) I've only read Ulysses once. *I've Ulysses read only once.

A further restriction on Pll is that it can apparently only co-occur with dynamic verbs, a finding which emerged from the analysis of questionnaire responses and tape-recorded spontaneous speech as produced by Belfast Vernacular speakers (again see Harris (1983 a) for details). Thus while verbs such as make, do, write, spend, etc. appear freely in P11 sentences, stative verbs such as know, recognize, resemble do not.5 No such restriction operates on the StE perfect:

(2i) Has he recognized her? *Has he her recognized?

[5] The questionnaire was administered to I45 northern HE speakers. One of the questions focused on the acceptability of PII occurring with four types of verb: dynamic verbs of

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It may at first seem to be a contradiction that a statal construction should occur only with dynamic verbs, until it is appreciated that, for the state referred to in PII to exist, there must be some prior action to bring it about. The analysis of PII as a complex construction accounts for this quite nicely. The state referred to in the main have clause is seen to have been initiated by the action described in the subjoined participial clause. Hence the tendency for dynamic verbs to appear in the latter position. Occurrence of a stative verb in the subjoined clause would be likely to produce a tautology: 'I have X in a state of being in a state'.

The difference in meaning between statal Pll and the StE actional perfect would on its own be enough to disqualify them from being considered variants of the same sociolinguistic variable (at least in its classical Labovian form). But the incompatibility of the two forms is even greater than a straight one-to-one comparison suggests. The scope of time reference associated with the StE perfect is covered in HE by no fewer than five forms: PI, Pll, be V+EN, preterite and present. Of these, the last two overlap into other areas of temporal reference which are covered by superficially identical forms in StE. In other words, HE P II and the StE perfect are embedded in grammatical subsystems that are not isomorphic (see Table I). The extent of this particular mismatch as well as the mismatch that exists in the area of habitual aspect points to the conclusion that, as far as the coding of semantic temporal and aspectual distinctions is concerned, StE and basic HE clearly do not share

StE form HE form

Preterite Then time P Indefinite anterior Preterite

Hot news PI

Perfect R PIT (dynamic V) Resultative

BE V +EN (mutative V) Extended now time| Present

Present Now time P

Table i Coding of six tense-aspect distinctions in StE and basic HE

activity (book, write, make), dynamic momentary verbs (jump, hit, kick), stative verbs of inert perception (recognize, understand, see), and stative relational verbs (own, resemble, rely on). Average acceptability ratings were as follows: dynamic activity (92 % ), dynamic momentary (20%), stative perception (9%0), stative relational (70%). The analysis of PII as a statal resultative provides a plausible explanation of why dynamic momentary verbs should be significantly less acceptable than other activity verbs in this context. The effects of momentary actions like hitting or jumping may not last long enough for them to be experienced as states.

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an underlying identity. The problems that this can pose for cross-dialectal communication are illustrated by cases of misunderstanding which have been observed to occur between StE and HE speakers (reported in Harris, I983b and Milroy, I984).

4. DIALECT CONVERGENCE AND GRAMMATICAL RESTRUCTURING

So far I have been discussing a type of HE which is maximally distinct from StE. To a certain extent of course this is a convenient idealization, similar to the one that has allowed linguists to talk about 'pure' dialects and 'basic ' vernaculars. Nevertheless, as we shall see, the assumption in this case does approximate reality in certain respects. However, as with parallel situations of dialect interface, it is usual in HE to find typically vernacular and typically standard forms being used in socially and stylistically differentiated variation with one another. The problem is how to quantify this variation when it also involves structural differentiation of the sort we encounter when we compare the StE and basic HE verb-phrases. In some areas of the grammar a shift from vernacular to standard usage entails not merely formal differences but functional differences as well. In such cases, as I have already pointed out, it would be misguided to subsume apparently alternating standard and nonstandard forms under a single syntactic variable and seek to account for their distribution in terms of an associated variable rule.

This kind of situation is of course nothing new: it is one with which creolists have been familiar for some years now. It has already been established that the grammars of creoles can be structurally quite distinct from those of their related superstrate languages. This has been clearly demonstrated within the post-creole continuum model (e.g. De Camp, 1971; Bickerton, 1975), where shifting between basilectal and acrolectal poles proceeds via the radical restructuring of underlying representations, not merely through the manipu- lation of low-level rules. What is new is explicit recognition of the possibility that similar restructuring processes operate in situations of interface between a standard variety and its non-creole vernacular relatives. It might be pointed out that HE is not typical of English vernaculars in that it has a recent history of language contact which at least partially resembles those of creoles. The points at which it exhibits wide structural divergence from StE might then be attributable to earlier substratum interference or perhaps to more general contact-induced changes. In fact, in so far as such phenomena are evident in HE they only account for part of the story. As we shall see, the nonstandard structure of the modern HE verb-phrase owes at least as much to earlier British English input as to Gaelic interference. The implication is that the degree of structural divergence which HE exhibits in relation to StE is also likely to be characteristic of 'mainstream', non-contact vernaculars, past or present.

According to Bickerton (I98I), shifting between structurally divergent lects

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involves first the acquisition of new forms and only subsequently the assignment to these of appropriate functions. During decreolization, an incoming superstrate form takes over the functions of the basilectal form which it is replacing, even if the forms when 'correctly' used are semantically not directly equivalent. Under further decreolization, the superstrate form is eventually assigned its appropriate function. If what I have been saying about the structural diversity of related non-creole varieties is correct, we should expect to encounter, in situations of dialect convergence, restructuring processes which conform to Bickerton's model. There is evidence to suggest that this is exactly what we do get when HE speakers seek to acquire the StE perfect.

Consider the task facing a hypothetical speaker who commands only a basilectal type of HE (from which the StE perfect is absent) and who seeks to adapt his output to standard norms. As far as the coding of semantic temporal-aspectual relations in this part of the grammar is concerned, there are some areas where the basilect exhibits overdifferentiation in relation to StE, others where it exhibits underdifferentiation. Correct acquisition of the StE perfect requires the speaker in question to overcome these areas of mismatch. In the case of overdifferentiation, the task should not in principle prove too difficult. All the speaker apparently has to do is neutralize a grammatical contrast that is present in the vernacular but absent from the standard. An example of this would be the HE distinction between the hot-news and other resultatives (see Table I). Much more problematical would be an area of the grammar where HE underdifferentiates in relation to StE. Here correct acquisition of a standard contrast would involve splitting a single vernacular category. By way of illustration, we may recall that HE does not grammaticalize the distinction between past anterior (then time) and indefinite present anterior in the way that StE does (again see Table I). StE uses the preterite to mark the former and the perfect to mark the latter; HE speakers often use the preterite in both cases. The problem for vernacular speakers then is that their use of the preterite sometimes corresponds to the use of the preterite in StE, but other times to the use of the standard perfect. Some HE speakers show evidence of having acquired the standard perfect form but less than complete control over its function. Such speakers frequently overgeneralize the form by using it in past anterior contexts, e.g.:

(22) They've cut down some of it, you know, it's been thirteen years ago maybe more. They've got about twelve raises since I've left. I've done a course two years ago. They've been here when we came.

Examples such as these can probably be considered hypercorrections which reflect the difficulty of acquiring a non-native grammatical distinction between indefinite and past definite within the anterior category. It would be

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interesting to investigate the possibility that similar 'inappropriate' uses of the perfect by British speakers (as reported for example in Trudgill, 1978) stem from parallel cases of structural mismatch between standard and vernacular varieties. Such examples may provide evidence that the modern perfect has not established itself uniformly across all dialects of English. I take up this issue in the following section.

5. VARIATION AND CHANGE IN THE HE VERB-PHRASE

Table 2 presents the results of a preliminary attempt to quantify variation in one area of the HE tense-aspect system. The scores were arrived at by counting tokens of forms which occurred as exponents of four semantic categories: resultative, hot news, extended now and indefinite anterior. As already pointed out, basic HE has five forms which speakers may use to make these distinctions transparent (P11, the be perfect, PI, present and preterite), while StE uses the perfect in all cases (see Table I). Tokens were collected from approximately fifteen hours of tape-recorded conversation produced by nine urban (Belfast) and fifteen rural (southwest Ulster) speakers (part of the much larger populations included in the Belfast sociolinguistic projects and the Tape-Recorded Survey of HE respectively). The collection and initial analysis of this sort of material present a number of familiar methodological difficulties. Not the least of these centres on the relative infrequency of tokens at this level of syntactic variation. (This works out at an average of just under fifteen per hour.) Another problem is one which is inherent in a functional approach to quantification such as that employed here. In the initial stages of analysis, the researcher is faced with the task of assigning the appropriate semantic category to each token. The onus on his/her ingenuity is reflected in the wide range of decisions that have to be made about the context in which tokens occur. For the purposes of quantifying phonological variation it is usually sufficient to take note of the immediate segmental or morphological context. However, when it comes to analysing higher-level syntactic variation, the scope of contextual factors is greatly increased. Account may have to be taken not only of possible syntactic constraints at the level of clause structure but also of much wider semantic, discourse and ultimately pragmatic considerations.6

The methodological difficulties notwithstanding, it still seems possible to

[6] The absence of hot-news PI tokens from the rural data appears to reflect the relatively formal conditions under which the fieldwork for the Tape-Recorded Survey of HE was conducted. This is in contrast with the Belfast sociolinguistic projects which made extensive use of participant-observation techniques to gain access to spontaneous vernacular speech (see Milroy, I980). The unscripted conversation obtained by the rural survey was elicited almost exclusively by formal interview. Not only did this militate against the occurrence of saliently nonstandard forms such as PI (questionnaire results indicate that this construction is openly stigmatized - see Harris, I983 a), but it also more often than not precluded questions dealing with the immediate context (including hot-news past).

3I6



SYNTACTIC VARIATION

Total non- StE

P I PII BE V + EN Pret Pres standard Perf

Urban speakers Maura D. 2 I 2 5 2

Maggie H. - 7 7 3 Patsy C. 4 4 4 Mary X. I I I 3 6 Eddy C. I I 2

Davy B. - I 4 - 5 14 Gordon K. I I 2 10

Tom M. - 5 Maisie B. 0 4

Total % non-standard forms: 35 Rural speakers

59A/3 I 6 5 I2 0

49A/3 4 2 6 0

48A/I I I I 3 0

58A/I 2 5 7 0 68A/i I I I 3 0

5oA/I I 6 - 7 I

49A/2 I 3 12 I 17 3 59A/I - 9 9 2 48 A/3 2 2 4 I

68A/3 4 - - 4 I

59A/2 2 7 I I II 12

48 A/2 3 I I 5 8 68 A/2 - 2 2 5 58 A/2 - I - I - 2 8 58 A/3 - - 0 7

Total 0 non-standard forms: 66

Table 2.

Use of the StE perfect and five corresponding nonstandard forms in northern HE

draw a number of tentative conclusions from the results presented in Table 2.

Firstly, assumptions about the existence of a 'basilectal' form of HE which is maximally distinct from StE do correspond to reality to some extent. It is possible to isolate relatively long stretches of conversation in which the five nonstandard HE forms occur to the exclusion of the StE perfect (see

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especially speakers 59A/3, 58A/i and 49A/3). Secondly, there is, perhaps not surprisingly, a much higher ratio of vernacular to standard forms among rural than among urban speakers. This parallels the situation attested in post-creole communities, where the highest incidence of basilectal forms is found to be concentrated in rural areas (e.g. Bickerton, 1975). The parallel- ism here extends to the possibility of ranking speakers according to their sociolectal range. Some speakers show a clear predominance of basilectal forms (e.g. 59A/3, 49A/2); some a predominance of acrolectal forms (e.g. 58 A/3, Davy B., Gordon K.). Others show both in roughly equal proportions (see especially 59A/2 and 48A/2).

One of the central principles of wave theory, of which the post-creole continuum model is an offshoot, is that synchronic dialect continua recapitulate diachronic developments (e.g. Bailey, 1973; Bickerton, 1975). Thus, within post-creole communities, basilectal varieties are assumed to reflect most closely the structure of antecedent creoles, while mesolectal varieties reflect subsequent developments in the decreolization process. The extent to which it might be possible to recognize a similar situation in Ireland is a topic that would take up another paper. However, a number of historical points which are relevant to the present discussion can be noted briefly here. These return us to the question of Irish Gaelic interference. In the light of the widely held assumption that many if not most nonstandard characteristics of HE syntax stem from contact-induced change, might it not be possible to draw the parallels with post-creole communities even more closely by asserting that basilectal HE represents an 'earlier' contact variety which displays the effects of heavy substratum interference? More standardized varieties of HE might then be considered to recapitulate a diachronic process of convergence towards the superstrate. This hypothesis has some support. There is documentary evidence of an early jargonized form of HE (English vocabulary grafted on to Irish syntactic and phonological patterns - see especially the seventeenth-century texts in Bliss, 1979). Furthermore, some of the most saliently nonstandard HE features have been noted with very high frequency in the speech of present-day Irish-English bilinguals (e.g. Henry, 1977; Ni Ghallchoir, I 98 I). For some of these features, the case for a Gaelic interference source seems overwhelming. For some others, however, the evidence in favour of this position is less than convincing. We may begin our consideration of this evidence by examining the ways in which Irish expresses the resultative, hot-news, indefinite anterior and extended-now distinctions.

Irish lacks a fully grammaticalized perfect form. Generally speaking, it is similar to basic HE in using a simple or periphrastic present form to code extended-now time:

(23) Ta se marbh le fada riamh. BE + nonpast HE DEAD WITH LONG-TIME EVER HE: He's dead a long time. StE: He's been dead a long time.

3I8



SYNTACTIC VARIATION

(24) Tai si ag obair 6 mhaidin BE + nonpast SHE AT WORKING FROM MORNING

HE: She's working since morning. StE: She's been working since morning.

As in HE, the distinction between then time and indefinite anterior is not grammaticalized. Irish uses a simple past form in both cases:

(25) Chuaigh se amach. GO + past HE OUT

HE: He went out StE: He has gone out.

He went out.

With regard to the expression of resultative aspect, Irish has two constructions which closely resemble HE PI and Pll. In fact, Greene (1979) uses the same terms to describe them. Hot-news PI in Irish is formed by a 'be' verb followed by tar eis/treis or i ndiaidh ('after') and a verbal noun:

(26) Tai Si treis an b ad a dhiol. BE + nonpast SHE AFTER THE BOAT SELLING

HE: She is after selling the boat. StE: 'She has just sold...'

PIT in Irish is realized as a possessive construction which incorporates a verbal adjective as object complement (possession in Irish is expressed prepositionally as 'object-of-possession is at possessor'):

(27) Ta an b ad diolta aici BE + nonpast THE BOAT SOLD AT-HER

HE: She has the boat sold. StE: She has sold the boat.

The literature on HE is full of claims that the undoubted similarities with Irish in this area of the grammar are directly due to substratum interference (e.g. van Hamel, I912; Bliss, 1972; Todd, I975; Sullivan, I976). As far as HE PI is concerned, there can be little doubt that it is a calque on the Irish construction illustrated in (26). The only other varieties of English that have this form (at least with a hot-news or similar reading) are those that are immediately descended from HE, e.g. those spoken in Newfoundland and the Ottawa valley.7 Many writers claim that HE PII arose through a similar process of calquing. It is alleged that the post-object position of the

[7] In Newfoundland, PI has apparently spread from the core HE area of the southern shore into areas which have much weaker Irish connections. This diffusion has been accompanied by an extension of meaning to include 'stale news', i.e. to cover both immediate and relatively remote past (Sandra Clarke, personal communication). Similar to PI is the construction He's behind telling you ('He's just told you') noted by Visser as occurring in Devon (1973: 2211). This too is probably Celtic in origin and might be attributable to earlier interference from Cornish, cf. Welsh Yr wyf wedi canu (literally 'I am after sing').

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EN-participle reflects the Irish object-noun-phrase + verbal adjective structure illustrated in (27). However, in the case of this construction and the nonstandard use of present and preterite forms to 'translate' the StE perfect, the evidence for substratum interference is ambiguous to say the least. The writers in question overlook the fact that similar features are well attested in earlier forms of British English as well as to a certain extent in some present-day varieties spoken outside Ireland.

The historical evidence suggests that, with the clear exception of PI, the nonstandard HE 'perfect' forms, far from being HE innovations with an exclusive background in substratum interference, are actually retentions of older English patterns. It is as well to bear in mind that the standard periphrastic perfect, at least in its present-day form and function, is a relative newcomer to the English tense-aspect system. It is important to establish how the four temporal-aspectual distinctions under discussion here were expressed in English during the formative years of HE, particularly in the seventeenth century. There is ample evidence that HE has preserved many characteristics of Early Modern English phonology (see Harris, I983 c), and there is no reason to suspect that this might not also be true at the syntactic level. It can be shown that basic HE exhibits a verbal group pattern which closely resembles that of Early Modern English. The extent to which other dialects of English show similar retentions is difficult to gauge accurately, since descriptions of verbal-group variation in the dialectological literature tend to focus on FORMAL differences to the exclusion of valuable information on how these FUNCTION in the grammaticalization of tense and aspect.

Documentary evidence reveals that the present-day perfect form was already available in Early Modern times as a means of coding all four of the temporal and aspectual distinctions under discussion here. But the form was by no means as firmly established then as it is in StE today. Its functions were also fulfilled, depending on the context, by the preterite, a present form, an older intransitive perfect formed with be, or an older transitive 'split' perfect formed with have and an EN-participle placed after the object noun-phrase.

The occurrence of the preterite in indefinite anterior contexts is well attested in Old English (e.g. Ne seah ic elfeodige (Beowuif 336) 'I have never seen foreigners'). In Middle and Early Modern English this function was increasingly usurped by the new perfect, but the older usage was still very much in evidence in the seventeenth century (Visser, 1973: 755-757). Visser provides many examples, among which we find

(28) I not remember - Why then you never saw the prettiest toy That ever sung or danc'd. (Middleton (c. I623) Spanish Gipsie I. v. I04.)

This usage survives to a certain extent in some conservative British varieties and, as mentioned in Section 3, in American English (see Traugott, 1972: 179).

As is well known, the use of some kind of present form to express extended-now time is widely distributed across Indo-European languages,

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SYNTACTIC VARIATION

including Germanic (e.g. German Ich kenne ihn seit zwei Jahren). English was apparently at one time more similar to its sister languages in this respect. In Old English we find such sentences as Min wif isfor manegum wintrum untrum ('My wife has been infirm for many winters' - iElfric, Saints' Lives 474, 43). This usage survived well into Early Modern times. Here too, numerous examples are supplied by Visser, including the following from Shakespeare (1973: 738):

(29) Since the youth of the Count's was to-day with my Lady, she is much out of quiet.

(Twelfth Night I. i. 23.)

Similar occurrences of the present to mark extended-now time are reported sporadically in more recent British varieties. Among Visser's examples we find We are here seven months (James Barrie (c. I893), A rolling stone). Beal's (I984) discussion of modals in present-day. Tyneside speech includes He cannot get a job since he left school.

A frequently used intransitive resultative construction in Old English, which was restricted for the most part to mutative verbs, was one consisting of a 'be' form plus an EN-participle. This has now largely been superseded by the modern perfect in StE (see Visser, 1973: 2042 ff.). Compare Is his eafora nu heard her cumen (Beowulf 375-6) with its modern translation 'Now his son has come here'. The old be resultative was still very much in use in Early Modern English. For example, in Shakespeare we find (cited in Visser, I973).

(30) The Duke of Buckingham and I Are come from visiting his majesty. (Richard III I. iii. 32.)

The construction is still to be found sporadically in more recent varieties of American and British English (see Visser, I973: 2042 ff. for examples).

The modern English perfect is generally agreed to derive historically from an older transitive 'split' perfect which consists of a 'have' form and an EN-participle placed after the object noun-phrase, e.g. Old English Ic hafde hine gebundenne. This construction is often interpreted as referring to a state of completion ('I had him in a state of being bound' - see Traugott, I972: 93-4). The 'have' of this older perfect is usually assumed to be a full lexical verb denoting possession and the participle to be a complement of the object noun-phrase (e.g. Visser, 1973: 2I89). (This analysis, it will be noted, is identical to the one I have proposed for Pll in HE.) The attributive force of the participle was often made explicit in Old English through inflectionally marked agreement with the object. In the example just cited, gebundenne shows the masculine singular accusative suffix -ne agreeing with hine. The modern actional perfect developed out of the older statal perfect through the amalgamation of main-verb have and the participle into a unified periphrastic verb-form. Have became morphologized as a marker of tense-aspect, while the participle became elevated to the status of head word in the new verbal

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group (see Givon, 1979: 96ff.). The cohesion within the new verbal group is reflected in the diachronic movement of the participle to the immediate right of have. (For a discussion of the parallel development of periphrastic 'have' perfects in Romance, see M. Harris, I982.)

A combination of two developments has brought about a reduction in the frequency of the old split perfect in modern standard usage: the rise of the new actional perfect and the replacement of lexical have by have got. The latter development has left its mark on English English to a greater extent than on American. Thus the following examples of the split perfect in current American English (from McCoard, I978) would be more likely to occur with have got in modern standard English English:

(31) John has his dissertation completed. John has that disposed of. He has the letter written.

The rise of the modern perfect can be traced as a gradual diffusion into more and more linguistic environments from which it has ousted the preterite, a present form, the old be resultative and the old split perfect (see Traugott, 1972: 93-94, 144-146, 179). But this development has not been uniform in all dialects of English; in some conservative varieties it has not been generalized to the same extent as in standard English English. HE seems to be the most conservative dialect of all in this area of the grammar. It retains older uses of the preterite in indefinite anterior contexts (compare example (i I) with (28)) and of a present form in extended-now contexts (compare (I 2), (I 3) with (29)). HE be V+ EN not only appears to be a relic of the older English be resultative but also preserves the latter's characteristic preference for mutative verbs (compare (9) with (30)). Finally, it looks very much as though HE PII is a retention of the older English split perfect. Compare Shakespeare's

(32) Have you the lion's part written? (Midsummer Night's Dream I. ii. 68.)

with

(33) I haven't it written out properly yet. (Daphne H., Dromore, Down.)

(Maybe the old adage that Ulster speech is a mixture of the Gaelic of the earls and the English of Shakespeare is not so far from the truth after all!) The striking similarities between HE and Early Modern English are summarized in Table 3, which presents a comparison of how the two varieties potentially express(ed) the temporal-aspectual distinctions under discussion here. (Potentially is appropriate here to allow for the occurrence of the new perfect in less conservative types of both varieties.)

In the light of the historical evidence briefly summarized here, we may conclude that, in the area of the grammar under discussion, only HE PI can be said to have its origins exclusively in Irish interference. The nonstandard

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SYNTACTIC VARIATION

EModE form HE form

Then time Preterite Indefinite Preterite

anterior Hot news PI

be V+EN Resultative be V+EN

have NP V+ EN J have NP V+ EN (P II) Extended

Present now time Present Now time

Table 3. Coding of six tense-aspect distinctions in Early Modern English and HE

distribution of the other forms vis-a'-vis the standard perfect appears to reflect Early Modern English patterns. The effects of Irish interference on the latter can perhaps best be regarded as reinforcing and indirect ('preservative' in Weinreich's (I966) terminology) rather than exclusive and direct. The geographical differentiation which is evident in Table 2 can be taken to indicate 'apparent-time' differences, a synchronic recapitulation of the rise of the modern perfect. The rural lects with their higher incidence of nonstandard usage represent an 'earlier' stage in the development of the HE verb-phrase; a stage at which the preterite, present, and the older be and split resultatives maintain a vigorous existence in contexts where the new perfect has replaced them in more standardized varieties.

6. CONCLUSION

According to the classical generative model, linguistic change proceeds initially through the modification of low-level rules (e.g. Halle, I962; King, I969). After an accumulation of such changes a grammar may undergo a restructuring of underlying representations. The intervention of restructuring means that a given language at time T1 does not share an underlying identity with its daughter language at T2. But of course not all dialects of a single language undergo such changes simultaneously. This time-lag factor has the effect of producing dialect divergence. Two sister dialects, A and B, may share a structural identity at time T1. That identity will obviously be lost if, by T2, dialect A has undergone a particular change but B has not. The divergence will be limited to low-level differences if dialect A has merely undergone rule change. However, if A undergoes restructuring and B doesn't, the effects of divergence are likely to be much more far-reaching. Adding the time

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dimension to a consideration of dialect differences underlines the untenability of the panlectal identity hypothesis. The classical generative views of diachronic divergence and synchronic cohesion amongst dialects are shown to contradict one another. Given that radical restructurings can occur, the only way in which the panlectal identity hypothesis might be salvaged would be to insist that such restructurings apply simultaneously to all dialects of a single language. This would be patently absurd.

Consider now what happens when sociolinguistic pressures encourage dialect convergence. In principle, one of two change-types is likely to occur. Speakers of a vernacular A who seek to adapt to the norms of a prestige variety B will have to execute either FOOTSTEP-FOLLOWING or STEP-RETRACING strategies. Footstep-following is required when B has undergone a particular change and A hasn't. Adaptation to the prestige model involves A speakers in the recapitulation of the change that has affected B. Step-retracing is required if vernacular A has undergone a change (whether this is contact- induced or due to 'normal' evolutive processes) which has left standard B unaffected. Here adaptation to the standard entails undoing the change that has occurred in A.

If dialect divergence results from the restricted geographical and/or social distribution of a particular low-level change, subsequent convergence is likely to produce variation which is amenable to description in terms of a low-level variable rule. If, however, divergence stems from the selective distribution of a radical restructuring, variation in conditions of subsequent convergence is likely to be more complex. Here variation will involve standard and nonstandard forms which are embedded in underlyingly non-identical grammars. Under such circumstances we are likely to encounter the sort of situation I have outlined with respect to the HE and StE verb-phrases, where formal differentiation overtly signals functional differentiation.

The history of the English verb-phrase clearly involves more than mere changes in low-level rules. Rather, there has been a progressive and radical restructuring of the means by which particular temporal and aspectual relations are formally expressed. One of the most significant innovations since Old English times has been the gradual rise of periphrastic verb-forms with do, have or be. Their development can be traced as an evolution from loosely concatenated constructions into fully syntacticized verb-forms. As these have become grammaticalized in the verbal group rules of English they have edged the older, simple forms out of many of their original functions. Thus the periphrastic be progressive has invaded the semantic space of the simple present and past forms. Periphrastic do forms have replaced simple forms in some syntactic contexts (e.g. negative, interrogative) and, in some dialects such as those spoken in Ireland and residually in southwest England, have taken over their habitual or generic functions (see Ihalainen, 1976). Likewise, the modern periphrastic have perfect, in more innovative varieties at least, has been moving in on some of the functions originally performed by the preterite as well as largely replacing the older be and 'split' perfects.

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These changes have not of course proceeded uniformly across all dialects of English. Different periphrastic forms have become selectively established in different dialects. The progressive, for example, has been generalized to a greater extent in some dialects than in others. In some 'Celtic fringe' dialects, it has been extended to stative verbs (Are you wanting that?), a context from which it is almost completely excluded in StE. As late as the nineteenth century, formal standard usage permitted the occurrence of simple verb-forms in environments where the progressive would be almost categorically used today, e.g. Even whilst we speak the ministers of justice wait below (Shelley, Cenci v. i. 64, cited by Visser, I973: 665). Similarly, the establishment of the modern have perfect has been more thorough-going in some dialects than in others. StE is particularly innovative in this respect. More conservative varieties (such as some American, Scottish and in particular Hibernian types) have, to varying degrees, been more resistant to its progress.

The selective geographical and social distribution of these changes has produced an underlying structural divergence in the ways in which different varieties of English organize the grammaticalization of tense and aspect. Adaptive shifts in the direction of standard norms involve vernacular speakers in seeking to overcome these structural differences. As regards the progressive, for example, adaptation entails step-retracing for speakers of dialects which are characterized by an overgeneralization of its use in relation to StE. On the other hand, in the case of the modern perfect, footstep-following is required of speakers of conservative dialects such as HE where the form is not particularly well established.

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