This is the second volume of a series entitled A comparative grammar of British English dialects, ‘designed to provide new insights into grammatical variation, and to support the growing interest in the corpus-based study of dialects’ (authors’ preface, p. v). The first volume, subtitled Agreement, gender, relative clauses, was published in 2005 and presented as ‘the first in a series of volumes which will be published at irregular intervals’ (Kortmann Reference Kortmann, Wagner, Kortmann, Herrmann, Pietsch and Wagner2005: v). On the publisher's website (www.degruyter.com/view/product/176424), under ‘aim and scope’, the series is misleadingly referred to as ‘A contemporary grammar . . .’. The series is, in fact, chiefly based on data from the Freiburg English Dialect Corpus (FRED), which consists of material ‘that would best be classified as traditional dialect data’ (Kortmann & Wagner Reference Kortmann, Wagner, Kortmann, Herrmann, Pietsch and Wagner2005: 5).

In comparison with the first volume in the series which covered new ground with respect to certain much–discussed, well-known issues in dialect syntax, this somewhat slimmer volume introduces more neglected fields: past possession and obligation (a chapter by Monika Edith Schulz), the functional diversity of personal pronouns (Nuria Hernández) and complement clauses (Daniela Kolbe). The three studies, which appear to be based on the authors’ PhD theses, vary considerably in length: Schulz's contribution comprises a mere 32 pages, whereas those by Hernández and Kolbe are both about 100 pages longer.

The three authors have also written an extensive introduction (pp. 1–17), providing an up-to-date overview of the field of dialect syntax including the rising importance of corpus linguistics and functional typology. It is pointed out that the focus in dialectology has shifted from phonological and lexical to morphosyntactic variation, partly due to the methods developed in corpus linguistics, microparametric syntax and variationist sociolinguistics. The value of typological surveys, such as found in the Mouton Handbook of varieties of English (Kortmann Reference Kortmann and Schneider2004) is also emphasized. The FRED corpus, a 2.5 million-word corpus of spontaneous speech characterized as ‘naturalistic spoken material’ (p. 2) including data from oral history recordings, is briefly but instructively presented (a more detailed description was given in the 2005 volume) and finally the aims and outline of this particular volume are described. Brief summaries of the three studies are also provided, as is a substantial list of references.

Monika Edith Schulz's innovative study on variable past possession and obligation marking certainly addresses a neglected topic in dialect syntax. Utilizing FRED data representing the Midlands and the North (180,000 words for each area), she focuses on the distribution of past possessive had and had got and past obligation had to and had got to. She also discusses present tense obligation, though this is not well represented in the data.

Her ‘informants’, i.e. the speakers included in the FRED corpus, were all born between 1884 and 1910, thus almost representing the same generation as featured in the Survey of English Dialects (SED). Following Trudgill (Reference Trudgill1999), Schulz's starting point is that her northern data represent a relic area, whereas her Midlands subcorpus should be characterized as a transition area. One of her aims, in fact, is to find out whether Trudgill's classification, based on phonological indicators as it is, will be confirmed by the morphosyntactic features she investigates.

It is well known that there is a link between possession and obligation, as pointed out in several recent studies of language contact and grammaticalization. In a succinct introduction to her topic of investigation Schulz states that such a link has been convincingly established with respect to the English language, yet almost exclusively based on the link between have to and have (poss.). Past possession/obligation, i.e. had got/had got to, has been largely neglected, described as rare or even non-existent. The importance of grammaticalization for the study is presented in the following section, concluding that the concept of ‘layering’ is applicable, distinguishing between ‘high- and low-codability experiential domains’.

Illlustrated by an impressive amount of examples, a detailed account constituting the bulk of the article demonstrates convincingly the author's strategies for disambiguating past possession – of which, in turn, there are several subtypes – and obligation. Ambiguous examples, such as Well, mi mother always had a family to look after (ex.18, p. 28), were coded separately, and only very clear and unambiguous examples were classified as past possessive had got.

Considering the regional perspective, it appears that there are striking differences between the Midlands and the North. had got to, for example, is totally absent in the northern data, and, interestingly, it is argued that the system of obligation marking is less grammaticalized in the North (p. 41). The regional differences are to some extent confirmed, although examples are not plentiful, in the analysis of past obligation/possession and negation as in didn't have to, hadn't to, hadn't got to (the last-mentioned form completely absent in the North).

The final section of the article considers variation in present tense affirmative contexts where there is no other auxiliary present (‘non-syntactic contexts’), viewed in comparison with earlier studies based on other data, such as the London–Lund corpus, FLOB and ICE-GB. There are striking differences: must, for example, as the default obligation marker in the London–Lund material has been ‘ousted’ by have got to in the dialect data. With respect to must as a marker of epistemic necessity, however, it is unchallenged in the dialect data, and there is a clear trend towards monosemy.

Whereas the topic addressed by Schulz is clearly underresearched in dialect research, ‘Personal pronouns’, the simple title of the contribution by Nuria Hernández, may sound quite familiar to anyone interested in dialectology. Even introductory textbooks, such as Trudgill (Reference Trudgill1999), tend to include substantial sections on pronoun-related topics, especially related to pronoun exchange and forms of address. Also, as mentioned by way of introduction, the first volume in the series A comparative grammar of British English dialects includes a book-length, much-quoted, seminal contribution by Susanne Wagner devoted to pronouns, with special reference to gender marking. Katie Wales's important work Personal pronouns in Present-day English, including some aspects of regional English, should also be mentioned here.

Hernández's all-embracing title is justified in that the study provides an ambitious, eclectic overview based on an empirical investigation, utilizing FRED data, of the functional diversity of personal pronouns as used in nonstandard British English (in actual fact exclusively based on data from England). A special, sizeable subcorpus has been compiled for the study, representing four dialect areas: Southeast, Southwest, Midlands and North. In all, the data extraction resulted in well over 132,500 individual occurrences.

Variation in individual phenomena is studied as well as the pronominal paradigm as a whole. Three main form types are distinguished: subject forms (S), object forms (O) and ‘self-forms’, such as myself. Pronoun variation, ‘a regular feature of spontaneous speech’, is described and discussed, taking a cross-linguistic perspective and considering three different aspects: number and person, gender and case. The functional range of each pronoun is presented in great detail and condensed in three extensive appendices. In accordance with Croft's claim (1990: 81) that markedness is related to functional diversity it is suggested, based on the data, that the least marked and most versatile personal pronoun forms in English are object forms, with me being used in 35 out of 50 syntactic functions, more than half of which are non-standard uses (p. 63). The general versatility of the pronouns, as easily retrieved from consulting the matrices, shows that virtually all S-forms are occasionally used as objects and prepositional complements, and all O-forms occasionally used in subject function.

The detailed analysis of the data (quantitative as well as qualitative) is presented in the following order: variation in number and person, variation in gender, and variation in case, of which the first category is the most robust. Shifts in spontaneous speech representing that category are often unintentional and may be due to changes of perspective, as in The Duke of York's, they were a round potato (p. 65). A more stable characteristic is the well-known use of us instead of me as in Give us a kiss, which is particularly well represented in the northern data. Logically, but somewhat surprisingly, the use of non-standard, ‘generic’ question tags such as invariant innit is also dealt with in this context (Someone or the other, they did get some of these names, innit? (p. 68)). It is a surprise, at least to this reviewer, that there are so many examples of that ‘trendy’ invariant tag, considering the traditional character of this data.

As mentioned above, variation in gender has already been competently and exhaustively dealt with by Susanne Wagner (Reference Wagner, Kortmann, Herrmann, Pietsch and Wagner2005) in an exhaustive investigation of gendered pronouns, based partly on FRED data but also on more traditional material, including data from Newfoundland. While recognizing the importance of Wagner's study, Hernández explicitly focuses on two issues: the frequency of gendered pronouns and the determinants of variation between gendered forms and it. Her ambitious investigation considers an impressive array of aspects, such as the importance of the speaker viewpoint, the role of referent categories, topicality, syntactic position and regional differences.

Earlier, ‘pre-Wagner’ research on gendered pronouns in varieties of English has reported on the ‘count–mass’ system as especially characteristic of England's West Country. This system is so called because it makes a distinction between references to count nouns (usually viewed as masculine as marked through gendered pronouns) and mass nouns (referred to by it). The general agreement among present-day dialectologists appears to be that the old count–mass system is disappearing and has developed into an optional system. Yet a detailed analysis of the FRED data, interestingly, shows that ‘gendered pronouns occasionally still have mass reference, and that the semantic field of the gendered referent plays a crucial role’, as does the speaker viewpoint (p. 75). Another finding is that systems of gendered pronouns are not restricted to the West Country but represent a supraregional phenomenon.

It is beyond the scope of this review to do justice to the detailed, sophisticated analysis based on a wealth of data and abounding with new ideas. It is, for example, well known to anyone studying English grammar that masculine and feminine gendered pronouns are still used in referring to ships and domestic animals, but the FRED data exemplifies a surprising variety of other semantic categories: plants, vehicles, machines and tools, buildings, food and drink, etc. (p. 79). This is illustrated by a number of examples, which make a very good read indeed, such as example (36), p. 81, showing how a rake is first referred to by it as an inamimate tool, and then as something dangerous, marked by the change in pronoun: ‘he had spikes each end . . .’.

The presentation of ‘variation in case’ is not restricted to the familiar, but previously underresearched (see Trudgill Reference Trudgill, Kortmann and Schneider2004: 147) topic of pronoun exchange, the definition of which is revised and extended in this study, but also includes substantial, innovative analyses of case variation in prepositional phrases, and the use of different case forms in ‘qualified’ (‘modified’) pronouns, as exemplified by us two, they both.

In her elegant and thought-provoking synopsis and discussion, the author first points out that pronoun variation is a regular characteristic of spontaneous speech, and – partly in conflict with previous accounts – that the features she has presented are largely characterized by general supraregionality. She believes that for most of the phenomena she has investigated ‘the ubiquitous use indicates a natural structural development that may have happened independently in different places’ (p. 157). In contrast with the conclusion of Schulz's investigation, the results also show that dialect regions established on phonological criteria may not necessarily be valid for morphosyntactic features.

The third contribution, Daniela Kolbe's ‘Complement clauses’, addresses a topic not generally featured in works on English dialect syntax, at least not in textbooks. ‘Complementation’, however, was listed as a core issue in morphosyntax for the Handbook of varieties of English (Kortmann et al. Reference Kortmann and Schneider2004), to which Kolbe occasionally refers, but her penetrating study goes far beyond what was contained in the contributions to the Handbook.

This study, too, deserves much praise for its ground-breaking, skilful and penetrating analysis of massive and complicated data. It is also characterized by a wide outlook and erudition in a variety of fields: linguistic theory, (historical) dialectology, sociolinguistics, Celtic languages. It is, for example, interesting to see the frequent references to Edwards & Welten (Reference Edwards, Welten and Wolfgang1985), an important report and inspiration for further research on non-standard dialects of British English.

On the other hand, however, I have to say that the text is not very reader-friendly, with special reference to the introduction. The very first sentence is particularly conspicuous by its vagueness: ‘In the research on the syntax of British dialects of English, there are numerous accounts of non-standard features in particular dialects.’ I certainly agree with the author that there is some terminological confusion with regard to ‘complement’ as well as ‘complement clause’ and I commend her for the penetrating discussion of this issue, but it does take a while for the reader to understand what the article is all about.

Once the terminological issue has been settled by adopting Biber et al.'s (Reference Biber, Conrad and Leech1999) framework and use of the term ‘complement clause’ in the sense of ‘a clause functioning as complement or object’, the article is ‘on track’ for the reader. The study focuses on the following syntactic features: subject–verb inversion in indirect questions (a well-known feature of ‘Celtic Englishes’), the infinitive marker for to and the replacement of the complementizer in that clauses by as. The core objective is ‘to determine whether a speaker's regional origin determines her or his choice between the available options for the expression of the same syntactic structure’ (p. 201). In addition to FRED, this study also includes data from The Northern Ireland Transcribed Corpus of Speech (NITCS). To some extent the selection from FRED reflects an interest in areas with a Celtic substratum, including data from the Hebrides, the Scottish Highlands, the Isle of Man and Wales, but texts from various parts of England still dominate the data subsets in size.

The data extraction must have been extremely laborious since most finite complement clauses could not be identified automatically. Another problem had to do with distinguishing direct from indirect speech in certain cases. An interesting and detailed discussion is devoted to ‘embedded inversion’, i.e. the inversion of subject and verb in embedded or subordinate wh-clauses, as exemplified by I need to, I says to go down and see him, to see what is he going to do with it (p. 221). Embedded inversion, which is sometimes referred to as a feature of colloquial speech in varieties of English around the world, is particularly well known as a feature of Celtic Englishes, however. This is certainly borne out by Kolbe's data.

The investigation of the complementizer as shows, in contrast with information in the OED, that it is more frequent in the English Midlands than in the South, especially among older speakers. It appears that the morphosyntax of the Midlands dialects is ‘uncharted territory’ (p. 255), in fact the only mainland region not represented in Kortmann et al. (Reference Kortmann and Schneider2004). The results of the third study, on for to clauses, are – for various reasons – somewhat inconclusive due to shortage of data. It does the author credit to be open about the problem and discuss it in an intelligent and constructive way. Among other things, she points out that Norfolk, ‘the only county in East Anglia where contiguous for to has been reported’ (p. 287), is not represented in the FRED data from East Anglia. Another important finding is that age appears to be a very important influence on syntactic variation in general and it is vital that corpora be age-balanced, which is the case with the Northern Irish corpus used for her study.

Like its predecessor, this volume in the series A comparative grammar of British dialects is a most valuable contribution to the rising, worldwide exploration of dialect syntax and the search for angloversals and vernacular universals. I do not completely agree with the authors’ general claim, as stated in the introduction, that the focus in dialectology has shifted from phonological and lexical to morphosyntactic variation, but they have certainly demonstrated that syntactic features are equally researchable and equally important in trying to establish ‘dialect areas’. The three authors have all been members of the renowned Freiburg research group on English dialect syntax initiated by Professor Bernd Kortmann and it is obvious that they have been able to put the outstanding achievements emanating from their home institution to good use. I wish to point out, however, that as true scholars they take a critical stance even to their ‘home publications’, for example in assessing some contributions to the Handbook of varieties of English and the regional representation in the FRED corpus.