“They used to follow Ø river”: The Zero Article in York English

Laura Rupp,Sali A Tagliamonte

doi:10.1177/0075424219865933

Laura Rupp, Sali A Tagliamonte

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1177/0075424219865933

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Abstract

Speakers of York English (UK) use a zero article with definite singular nouns (e.g., “They used to follow Ø river”), which is impossible in Standard English. We probe the possibility that this form is a remnant from Old English, when there were no articles as they are currently found in Modern English, rather than a more contemporary development. We trace the diachronic trajectory of the zero article in historical-descriptive grammars and test social and linguistic constraints on its use in York English in a logistic regression analysis. The results show that information structure is a significant predictor of the zero article across all generations of the community and that the zero article is used in the same way as it was used as far back as Old English. However, it exhibits heightened usage among the older and younger generations, exhibiting a U-shaped curve. We suggest that this pattern demonstrates longitudinal maintenance of a conservative feature, which is suppressed in middle-age as the result of social pressures. In this way, this case study adds insight into the fate of dialect features in contemporary speech communities. It also highlights the importance of combining insights from different strands in linguistics for understanding the evolution of syntactic variants like the zero article.

Highlights

The IssueTraditional dialect features in conservative varieties of English have often figured prominently in explanations of language variation and change.1 The variety of English spoken in the city of York in northern England is a case in point
Our examination of the social and linguistic factors contributing to the use of the zero article in York English (YrkE) revealed a complex system
The main determinants of use are the individual’s type of job and information status: the zero article occurs favorably when the referent of the noun is discourse-new, hearer-old. We believe that this result can be understood in the historical context of how the zero article evolved in English

Summary

Introduction

The IssueTraditional dialect features in conservative varieties of English have often figured prominently in explanations of language variation and change. The variety of English spoken in the city of York in northern England is a case in point. The variety of English spoken in the city of York in northern England is a case in point It has three non-standard determiners: a zero article (Christophersen 1939), as in (1) and (2), a reduced determiner (Wright 1905:259), as in (3) and (4), and a complex demonstrative (e.g., Bernstein 1997), as in (5) and (6). Its use in Standard English (StdE) is known to be more or less restricted to: (7) proper names, (8) non-count nouns (mass and abstract nouns), and (9) generic or kind-denoting plural nouns Another use that has received attention in the literature concerns a circumscribed set of nouns naming social and geographical places such as church, school, and prison (see, e.g., Soja 1994 and Stvan 2007 for an inventory and discussion). These are frequently deployed as the complement of a prepositional phrase (PP) (Baldwin et al 2006), as in (10). Otherwise, as Dayal (2011:1089) has stated, “English typically does not allow bare singular arguments,” namely a singular subject or object without an article, “setting aside exceptions like man is mortal etc.” This restriction is illustrated in (11) with an example from Stvan (2007:172)

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