Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International ... - STIBA Malang

142 Cristina Suárez-Gómez
between ‘Old English’ and ‘Modern English’ ” (1992: 157). This diversity was
less obvious in both Old English and Early Modern English. In Old English,
this was due to the importance of West-Saxon, spoken in the southern part
of England (with the exception of the Southeastern part which had its own
Kentish dialect), as West-Saxon became the dialectal variety used in most available
prose texts. Other dialects are recorded in a few sparse documents, mainly
glosses of Latin texts: The Lindisfarne Gospels gloss and the Durham Ritual,
written in the Northumbrian dialect; The Rushworth Gospels and the Vespasian
Psalter, written in the Mercian dialect. 2 There were also some poems (Cædmon’s
Hymn) and riddles, but because of their intrinsic nature these provide little information
on syntax. As for Early Modern English, most written evidence is in
the ‘standard’ variety used in the London area, which thus leaves us with Middle
English as the period within the historical dialectology of the English language
that disposes of most comparable texts.
Studies of Middle English have disclosed major differences between northern
(comprising the North, West and East-Midlands) and southern (including
the South and Kentish) dialectal areas. In this North-South divide, northern dialects
are considered linguistically more advanced than southern ones, which are
deemed more traditional or conservative. It is generally assumed that innovation
in the northern dialects (inheritors of Old English Northumbrian and Mercian)
stems from eighth and ninth century Scandinavian invasions, while the southern
dialects (inheritors of West-Saxon and Kentish), especially the Southwestern,
continue the linguistic tradition. According to Milroy (1992: 181), “it is tempting,
therefore, to suggest that a history of relatively strong contacts with Danes and (to
a lesser extent) Normans may be implicated here, and that traditional forms survived
where these contacts were less strong” (Milroy 1992: 181).
Such linguistic differences lie basically at the level of lexis, phonology and
spelling and, to a lesser extent, at the level of grammar. The aim of this chapter
is to test whether evidence allows us to discuss different dialects from a syntactic
perspective paying attention to processes of relativization, both as regards
the paradigm of relativizers and the position adopted by the relative clause
within the main clause. Taking into account the fact that southern dialects are
more conservative than their northern counterparts, the underlying hypothesis
would be that the system of relativizers inherited from Old English and the
tendency towards extraposition typical of Old English, will be more frequent
in southern dialects. Non-southern dialects would show a more innovative
2. The dialect classification has been made following the corresponding COCOA headers of
The Helsinki Corpus of English Texts: Diachronic and Dialectal.