The Innovative North – the Morphosyntactic Makeup of Northern English Features

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to show the Northern English dialect as a complex creation dependent on various geographical, cultural and social factors responsible for its fluidity and changeable nature. Its strong tendencies towards developing new linguistic solutions are considerably manifested in the morphological and syntactic system which since the very beginning has been subject to alternations, sometimes affecting even other English dialects. The analysis of such areas as nominal and verbal inflection, pronouns, definite articles, auxiliaries, and irregular verbs, makes it tempting to notice certain regular patterns aimed at introducing modern, more economical and thus improved linguistic models. The character and motivation of these novel creations is at times perplexing and calls for arguments not only from historical linguistics, but also geographical and perceptual dialectology as well as functional and evolutionary theories. What is beyond any doubt, however, is that as a result of those new solutions the Northern dialect has become a special sociolinguistic construct whose specific morphosyntactic makeup reveals a unique and innovative dimension defining the North both of the past and of today.