e.g. It is much you boys can’t let alone they there ducks.
It was much he hadn’t a been a killed.
rising
‘rising’ is often used in the meaning of ‘nearly’
e.g. How old is the boy? - He’s rising five.
- ‘fell’, ‘unco’, ‘gey’, ‘huge’, ‘fu’, ‘rael’ are used in the meaning of
‘very’.
- ower, owre [aur] - ‘too’
- maist - ‘nearly’
- clean - ‘at all’
- that - ‘so’
- feckly - ‘in many cases’
- freely - ‘fully’
- naarhan, nighhan - ‘nearly’
- han, fair - ‘at all’
d) Adverbs of time:
whan, fan - ‘when’
belive, belyve - ‘now’
yinst - ‘at once’
neist - ‘then’
fernyear - ‘last year’
afore (= before)
e.g. Us can wait avore you be ready, sir.
next - ‘in some time’
e.g. next day = the day after tomorrow
while = till, if
e.g. You’ll never make any progress while you listen to me.
You have to wait while Saturday.
3.8 Transitivity and intransivity in the dialects of South-West
England.
One of the most important aspects of studying south-western English is
dialect syntax. So, the article by Jean-Marc Gachelin can give us much
information about transitivity and intransitivity in the dialects of South-
West England.
“Wakelin has pointed out that ‘syntax is an unwieldy subject which
dialectologists have fought shy of’. This brushing aside of dialect syntax
is regrettable because the study of grammatical variation can shed light on
the workings of any language, and thereby enrich general linguistics. The
present chapter deals with an area of dialect syntax - transitivity in
south-west of England dialects - and attempts to characterize and explain,
synchronically and diachronically, its salient features.
We prefer the moderation of Kilby, who simply admits that the notion
of direct object (DO) ‘is not at all transparent in its usage’. The
problem, therefore, should be not so much to discard but rather to improve
our notions of transitivity and intransitivity. In this regard, the
dialects of South-west England are important and interesting.
1. A description of transitivity and intransitivity in the dialects of
South-west England.
When compared with the corresponding standard language, any
geographical variety may be characterized by three possibilities:
(a) identity; (b) archaism (due to slower evolution); and (c)
innovation. Interestingly enough, it is not uncommon in syntax for (b) and
(c) to combine if a given dialect draws extensively on a secondary aspect
of an older usage. This is true of two features which are highly
characteristic of the South-west and completely absent in contemporary
Standard English.
1.1 Infinitive + y
One of these characteristics is mentioned by Wakelin, the optional
addition of the -y ending to the infinitive of any real intransitive verb
or any transitive verb not followed by a DO, namely object-deleting verbs
(ODVs) and ergatives. The use of this ending is not highlighted in the
Survey of English Dialects (SED, Orton and Wakelin). It is only indirectly,
when reading about relative pronouns, that we come upon There iddn (=
isn’t) many (who) can sheary now, recorded in Devon (Orton and Wakelin).
However, Widen gives the following examples heard in Dorset: farmy,
flickery, hoopy (‘to call’), hidy, milky, panky (‘to pant’), rooty (talking
of a pig), whiny. Three of these verbs are strictly intransitive (ftickery,
panky, whiny), the others being ODVs. Wright also mentions this
characteristic, chiefly in connection with Devon, Somerset and Dorset.
In the last century, Barnes made use of the -y ending in his Dorset
poems, both when the infinitive appears after to:
reäky = ‘rake’
skimmy
drashy = ‘thresh’
reely
and after a modal (as in the example from the SED):
Mid (= may) happy housen smoky round/The church.
The cat veil zick an’ woulden mousy.
But infin.+y can also be found after do (auxiliary), which in South-
west dialects is more than a more ‘signal of verbality’, serving as a tense-
marker as well as a person-marker (do everywhere except for dost, 2nd pers.
sing.). Instead of being emphatic, this do can express the progressive
aspect or more often the durative-habitual (= imperfective) aspect, exactly
like the imperfect of Romance languages. Here are a few examples culled
from Barnes’s poems:
Our merry sheäpes did jumpy.
When I do pitchy, ‘tis my pride (meaning of the verb, cf pitch-fork).
How gaÿ the paths be where we do strolly.
Besides ODVs and intransitive verbs, there is also an ergative:
doors did slammy.
In the imperative, infin. -y only appears with a negative:
don’t sobby!
The optional use of the -y ending is an advantage in dialect poetry
for metre or rhyme:
Vor thine wull peck, an’ mine wull grubby (rhyming with snubby)
And this ending probably accounts for a phonetic peculiarity of South-west
dialects, namely the apocope of to arguy (the former dialect pronunciation
of to argue), to carry and to empty, reduced to to arg, to car and to empt.
In the grammatical part of his Glossary of the Dorset Dialect, Barnes
insists on the aspectual connection between do and infin.+y:
“Belonging to this use of the free infinitive y-ended verbs, is
another kindred one, the showing of a repetition or habit of doing as ‘How
the dog do jumpy’, i-e keep jumping. ‘The child do like to whippy’, amuse
himself with whipping. ‘Idle chap, he’ll do nothen but vishy, (spend his
time in fishing), if you do leâve en alwone’. ‘He do markety’, he usually
attends market.”
Barnes also quotes a work by Jennings in which this South-west feature
was also described:
“Another peculiarity is that of attaching to many of the common verbs
in the infinitive mode as well as to some other parts of different
conjugations, the letter -y. Thus it is very common to say ‘I can’t sewy’,
I can’t nursy’, ‘he can’t reapy’, ‘he can’t sawy’, as well as ‘to sewy, to
nursy, to reapy, to sawy’, etc; but never, I think, without an auxiliary
verb, or the sign of the infinitive to.”
Barnes claimed, too, that the collocation of infin. +y and the DO was
unthinkable: ‘We may say, “Can ye zewy?” but never “Wull ye zewy up theäse
zêam?” “Wull ye zew up theäse zêam” would be good Dorset.”
Elworthy also mentions the opposition heard in Somerset between I do
dig the garden and Every day, I do diggy for three hours (quoted by
Jespersen and by Rogers). Concerning the so-called ‘free infinitive’,
Wiltshire-born Rogers comments that ‘it is little heard now, but was common
in the last century’, which tallies with the lack of examples in the SED.
(This point is also confirmed by Itialainen) Rogers is quite surprised to
read of a science-fiction play (BBC, 15 March 1978) entitled ‘Stargazy in
Zummerland’, describing a future world in which the population was divided
between industrial and agricultural workers, the latter probably using some
form of south-western speech, following a time-honoured stage tradition
already perceptible in King Lear (disguised as a rustic, Edgar speaks broad
Somerset).
To sum up, after to, do (auxiliary), or a modal, the formula of the
‘free infinitive’ is
intr. V > infin. + -y/0
where ‘intr.’ implies genuine intransitives, ODVs and even ergatives. As a
dialect-marker, -y is now on the wane, being gradually replaced by 0 due to
contact with Standard English.
1.2 Of + DO
The other typical feature of south-western dialects is not mentioned
by Wakelin, although it stands out much more clearly in the SED data. This
is the optional use of o’/ov (occasionally on) between a transitive verb
and its DO. Here are some of the many examples. Stripping the feathers off
a dead chicken (Orton and Wakelin) is called:
pickin/pluckin ov it (Brk-loc. 3);
trippin o’ en (= it) (D-loc. 6);
pickin o’ en (Do-loc. 3);
pluckin(g) on en - (W-loc. 9; Sx-loc. 2).
Catching fish, especially trout, with one’s hand (Orton and Wakelin)
is called:
ticklin o’/ov em (= them) (So-loc. 13; W-loc. 2, 8; D-loc. 2, 7, 8; Do-
loc. 2-5; Ha-loc. 4);
gropin o’/ov em (D-loc. 4, 6);
ticklin on em (W-loc. 3, 4; Ha-loc. 6; Sx-loc. 3);
tickle o’ em (Do-loc. l) (note the absence of -in(g)).
The confusion between of and on is frequent in dialects, but although
on may occur where of is expected, the reverse is impossible. The
occasional use of on instead of of is therefore unimportant. What really
matters is the occurrence of of, o’ or ov between a transitive verb and the
DO. The presence of the -in(g) ending should also attract our attention: it
occurs in all the examples except tickle o’ em, which is exceptional since,
when the SED informants used an infinitive in their answers, their syntax
was usually identical with that of Standard English, ie without of
occurring before the DO: glad to see you, (he wants to) hide it (Orton and
Wakelin).
Following Jespersen, Lyons makes a distinction between real
transitives (/ hit you: action > goal) and verbs which are only
syntactically transitives (/ hear you: goal < action). It is a pity that
the way informants were asked questions for the SED (‘What do we do with
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