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Speaker:
Caroline Heycock (University of Edinburgh)

In this talk I’ll present some of the kind of work that the SCOSYA (Scots Syntax Atlas) has been doing over the last three years. I’ll briefly present how we have been going about trying to document syntactic variation across the country, and the type of data that we have been gathering. Then I’ll focus on the data relating to the (variable) loss of “have-raising”, such that some dialects have now lost this option completely (so that the negative of “I have the money” can only be expressed as either “I don’t have the money” or “I haven’t got the money”); others have retained it; but still others show a definiteness effect (e.g. “I haven’t any monay” is OK, but “I haven’t the money yesterday" is not). I’ll present our proposal according to which these expressions of possession are in some cases structurally ambiguous, and that the pattern of loss - including the temporary emergence of the definiteness effect - is the result of competition between the different possible structures.

Abstract