Dr Laura Rupp

Old Wine in New Bottles: Tracing the Pathways of Dialect Death and Rebirth

The project significantly extends the applicant’s current research on obsolescing grammatical dialect features to new regions (Ireland/North East England). Rather than considering such rare forms as irrevocably ‘lost’, this proposal locates and documents them, pinpointing why some are likely to vanish whereas others will be preserved or repurposed. The project deploys the method for analyzing them proposed by Tagliamonte & Rupp (2022) on the basis of their findings from Canada. Three large-scale corpora from the other side of the Atlantic will be interrogated for this purpose. Newcastle University staff act as their data controllers. In collaboration with them, the applicant will seek out, analyse and interpret obsolescing grammatical dialect features from these corpora. The proposed research will therefore generate entirely new findings relating to the datasets themselves but also the extent to which previous methods and hypotheses for analysing the trajectory of dialect death are reliable and may be extended.