Abstract

AbstractThis chapter discusses non-standard grammatical features of regional varieties of English in relation to their Standard English functional equivalents. It pursues a cross-linguistic typological approach in the classification and interpretation of these features. This approach helps to reveal the often highly systematic relationship between standard and non-standard variants as well as the universal basis of the underlying cognitive principles. Illustration is drawn from reflexive marking, pronominal gender and case, tense and aspect, negation and negative concord, subject–verb agreement, and clause structure, which here includes ditransitive constructions, embedded inversion, and the formation of relative clauses.

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