2.1 Spontaneous speech

Vernacular speech is considered the gold standard in variationist sociolinguistics, primarily collected through the sociolinguistic interview (Labov Reference Labov1972), which aims to mitigate the Observer's Paradox: how to tap the most unmonitored style of speech when a participant is being monitored. The Principle of Accountability (Labov Reference Labov1966: 49) is also key to variationist study, and in particular, the linguistic variable, where a particular form is studied in relation to the form(s) it is in variation with. Moreover, the linguistic variable must be ‘high in frequency’ (Labov Reference Labov, Baugh and Sherzer1984: 49) for systematic patterns of variation to emerge. While debates on equivalence are no longer at the forefront of discussion (Lavandera Reference Lavandera1978; Buchstaller Reference Buchstaller2009), the issue of frequency with morphosyntactic variables remains, as they ‘often involve special semantic and pragmatic circumstances which may occur rarely or unpredictably in interview’ (Rickford et al. Reference Rickford, Wasow, Mendoza-Denton and Espinoza1995: 106). For example, Henry's (Reference Henry2005: 1609) work on the after-perfect in Belfast English found only three tokens in 720,000+ words, and Coats (Reference Coats2023: 706) finds 2.4 double modals per one million words in a corpus of Scots, despite both forms being robustly attested as part of the respective varieties. Studies on morphosyntactic variation thus often converge on a limited set of variables which appear frequently enough for analysis, including agreement (e.g. Cheshire & Fox Reference Cheshire and Fox2009; Rupp & Britain Reference Rupp and Britain2019), relative pronouns (e.g. Guy & Bayley Reference Guy and Bayley1995; Tagliamonte, Smith & Lawrence Reference Tagliamonte, Smith and Lawrence2005) and negative concord (e.g. Cheshire Reference Cheshire1982; Smith Reference Smith2001).

2.2 Acceptability judgments

Acceptability judgments have been the go-to methodology for theoretical syntacticians since the 1960s (Chomsky Reference Chomsky1966),Footnote ² and their reliability for investigating at least standard English has been experimentally demonstrated (e.g. Sprouse & Almeida Reference Sprouse and Almeida2017; Langsford et al. Reference Langsford, Perfors, Hendrickson, Kennedy and Navarro2018; Goodall Reference Goodall2021). The methodology has been extensively employed in the study of non-standard morphosyntactic variation, from early introspective work (Rizzi Reference Rizzi1982; Poletto Reference Poletto and Belletti1993) to recent large-scale crowdsourced projects (e.g. Zanuttini et al. Reference Zanuttini, Wood, Zentz and Horn2018). The judgment methodology has been refined for non-standard varieties, highlighting factors such as participant selection, conducting the task in the local dialect, and oral presentation of stimuli (Cornips & Corrigan Reference Cornips and Corrigan2005; Cornips & Poletto Reference Cornips and Poletto2005; Barbiers & Bennis Reference Barbiers and Bennis2007; Buchstaller & Corrigan Reference Buchstaller, Corrigan, Maguire and McMahon2011), and some studies have shown that judgment data can usefully complement spoken data. For example, Henry (Reference Henry2005) compares the judgments of nine Belfast English speakers on a set of examples with non-standard agreement patterns, to the agreement patterns found in a 130-hour corpus of Belfast English speech. She finds that the corpus gives useful information about frequency, but the judgments present an opportunity to find out what is ungrammatical as opposed to simply infrequent. However, concerns about whether reported judgments of acceptability truly reflect community speech patterns remain (Henry Reference Henry2005; Green Reference Green2010; Eide & Åfarli Reference Eide and Åfarli2020).

What factors might influence the accuracy of judgments in non-standard varieties? In the next section, we summarise Labov (Reference Labov, McNair, Singer, Dobrin and Aucon1996), who proposes reasons as to why speaker intuitions, as expressed through judgment tasks, might ‘fail’ to match up with speech patterns.

2.3 Why might intuitions fail?

Labov (Reference Labov, McNair, Singer, Dobrin and Aucon1996: 85) provides an overview of some linguistic variables where comparison between such intuitions and spontaneous speech is available.Footnote ³ One such case is positive anymore (2), ‘roughly equivalent to nowadays’:

1. (2) Cars are sure expensive anymore.

Despite widespread use in conversation data, speaker intuitions about the form were ‘very erratic indeed’ (Labov Reference Labov, McNair, Singer, Dobrin and Aucon1996: 84), with some speakers denying knowledge of the form despite using it in the same interview.

Another variable, ain't, has a complex set of sociolinguistic rules which provided a good testing ground for judgment data. With ain't for isn't (3), there is a direct correlation between intuitions and production: speakers in communities across the US produce it (Labov et al. Reference Labov, Cohen, Robins and Lewis1968; Feagin Reference Feagin1979; Hazen Reference Hazen, Arnold, Blake, Davidson, Schwenter and Solomon1996), and recognise it as grammatical (Labov Reference Labov, McNair, Singer, Dobrin and Aucon1996: 90).

1. (3) He ain't too smart.

However, in African American English (AAE), ain't can also be used as a variant of didn't (4). In Labov's data, AAE speakers recognise (4) as grammatical to the same extent they do unattested forms, such as (5) in which ain't is used for don't. Footnote ⁴ Both receive 40–50 per cent acceptance.

1. (4) He ain't see her yesterday.

2. (5) I ain't really wanna do that.

Two issues arise for the use of introspective judgments here: rejection of forms attested in speech (positive anymore, ain't for didn't), and acceptance of forms not found in speech data (ain't for don't). From these observations, Labov (Reference Labov, McNair, Singer, Dobrin and Aucon1996: 98) proposes reasons why speakers’ intuitions might ‘fail’:Footnote ⁵

1. I. A ‘socially superordinate norm’ may take precedence because:

   1. a. The availability of a non-regionally specific variant may override judgment of a regional form;

   2. b. There may be social stigma attached to the form.

2. II. Infrequency: ‘judgments that a form is ungrammatical may actually be motivated by the fact that it is rare’ (Labov Reference Labov, McNair, Singer, Dobrin and Aucon1996: 99).

Regarding (Ia), as we saw above, intuitions about positive anymore were ‘erratic’ among speakers who used it. Labov states that ‘the social bias [against anymore] is not at all obvious’ (Reference Labov, McNair, Singer, Dobrin and Aucon1996: 98), but nevertheless the non-regionally specific nowadays overrides speakers’ ability to introspect about anymore. Regarding (Ib), social stigma is complex, involving factors such as class (e.g. Niedzielski & Preston Reference Niedzielski and Preston2003), race (e.g. Alim, Rickford & Ball Reference Alim, Rickford and Ball2016), region (e.g. Preston Reference Preston1989), age (e.g. Cheshire Reference Cheshire, Ammon, Dittmar, Mattheier and Trudgill2005). What is considered prestigious varies across communities (Coupland & Bishop Reference Coupland and Bishop2007), although the ‘standard’ variety tends to hold sway across the board. Furthermore, stigma is closely related to social salience (Labov Reference Labov1994, Reference Labov2001; Labov et al. Reference Labov, Ash, Ravindranath, Weldon, Baranowski and Nagy2011), and to the divisions between indicators (socially stratified but not identifiable by speakers), markers (controlled depending on speech context) and stereotypes (‘the overt topics of social comment’) (Labov Reference Labov1994: 78). While markers and especially stereotypes may be stigmatised, indicators are, by hypothesis, below the level of consciousness.Footnote ⁶ The salience of a feature, and its possibility of being stigmatised, is therefore relevant to understanding why intuitions might fail. The influence of stigma on the results of judgment tasks can be seen in Blanchette's (Reference Blanchette2017: 2) study of negative concord. Although her participants report negative concord as unacceptable due to ‘heavy social stigma’, they ‘have grammatical knowledge’ of it, demonstrated in subtly different Likert-scale acceptability judgments for different types of sentences.

In terms of (II), absolute frequency may not be particularly important for acceptability. For example, it-clefts in English appear in ‘less than one tenth of a percent of all sentences’ (Roland, Dick & Elman Reference Roland, Dick and Elman2007: 353) but, given appropriate pragmatic contexts, are judged more acceptable than unclefted sentences (Destruel, Beaver & Coppock Reference Destruel, Beaver and Coppock2019). This seems to apply also to non-standard features: for example, Wood et al. (Reference Wood, Zanuttini, Horn and Zentz2020: 4) find that although the datives they investigate (1e) are ‘not frequently attested in written forms or even spoken corpora’, they are ‘robustly accepted’ in judgment tasks.

However, evidence exists for correlation between acceptability and the relative frequency of variants – although the picture gets more complicated at lower frequencies (Featherston Reference Featherston2005; Kempen & Harbusch Reference Kempen and Harbusch2005; Arppe & Järvikivi Reference Arppe and Järvikivi2007; Bresnan Reference Bresnan, Featherston and Sternefeld2007; Divjak Reference Divjak2017; Bader & Häussler Reference Bader and Häussler2010; Bermel & Knittl Reference Bermel and Knittl2012). What is considered ‘high frequency’ varies, from over 50 per cent (Bermel & Knittl Reference Bermel and Knittl2012) to just 3 per cent (Bader & Häussler Reference Bader and Häussler2010), but what is consistent is that relatively frequent variants receive high acceptability ratings. On the other hand, grammatical but rarely produced variants are neither categorically accepted nor rejected. Acceptability rates ranged from 20 to 60 per cent for low-frequency grammatical options in Bader & Häussler's (Reference Bader and Häussler2010) study of German word order, compared to over 80 per cent  acceptability for more frequent grammatical word orders, and < 10 per cent acceptability for ungrammatical word orders. This gives a good starting point for considering how relative frequency might impact the results of judgment tasks, though there may be additional factors at play when considering a non-standard variant alongside standard ones.

2.4 Summary

A range of factors may affect speakers’ abilities to introspect about the acceptability of morphosyntactic features, including frequency and social stigma. However, it remains unclear when these factors come into play and how they combine to influence the results of acceptability judgment tasks. Furthermore, there have been considerable adaptations made to judgment tasks to collect data from non-standard varieties. It is unclear to what extent the factors discussed in the context of earlier research continue to influence these adapted judgment tasks.

In the remainder of the article, we address these questions by comparing judgment data with spontaneous spoken data from the same speakers. In section 3, we introduce the social context of Scots and Scottish English in Scotland, SCOSYA, and its data collection methods, before comparing three different phenomena in section 4.

3.1 Scots and Scottish English in Scotland

Historically, Scots was a distinct Germanic language within the British Isles, spoken in Lowland Scotland. However, over the centuries following the political union of Scotland and England in the 1600s, the role and prestige of English within Scotland grew. In the present day, Scots – which is distinct from English lexically, morphosyntactically and phonetically – exists on a continuum with (Standard Scottish) English. The existence of the continuum at an interspeaker level intersects with various sociodemographic issues – e.g. broader Scots is often associated with working-class speakers – but on an intraspeaker level, many speakers of Scots style shift along the continuum depending on their interlocutors and the linguistic task at hand. Use of broad Scots in a professional context may be liable for disapproval, but so may use of Standard Scottish English when speaking to members of a speaker's own community. For more information on the continuum and the context of Scots in Scotland, see e.g. Aitken (Reference Aitken and Trudgill1984), Johnston (Reference Johnston and Britain2007), Smith (Reference Smith, Kortmann and Lunkenheimer2012).

In Aitken (Reference Aitken and Trudgill1984), linguistic features of Scots are divided into covert, overt and vulgarisms, generally mapping to Labov's indicators, markers and stereotypes. Many morphosyntactic features of Scots are covert – used by speakers across class boundaries ‘unself-consciously’. Speakers are often unaware of alternative (standard English) ways to express the same meaning (Aitken Reference Aitken and Trudgill1984: 18). For example, Scots covertly employs modal verbs can and will in place of may or shall respectively. Overt Scots features are used freely at the broad Scots end of the continuum, but can also be employed stylistically in more Standard Scottish English ‘on occasions when it seems desirable to claim membership of the in-group of Scots’ (Aitken Reference Aitken and Trudgill1984: 22); for example, in proceedings of the Scottish Parliament, using the Scots-specific form kent in place of the (Standard Scottish) English knew in ‘Burns kent better’ (quoted in Corbett & Stuart-Smith Reference Corbett, Stuart-Smith and Hickey2012: 86). Finally, vulgarisms are features of Scots that are often considered ‘Bad Scots’ and condemned across social contexts (Aitken Reference Aitken and Trudgill1984: 24). These tend to be variables that are most associated with urban Scots varieties and/or younger speakers, despite the fact that they may be used across social and regional groups – such as the pronoun youse (see also Corbett & Stuart-Smith Reference Corbett, Stuart-Smith and Hickey2012 for how these different categories are realised in both spoken and written data).

It is important to remember when considering Aitken's distinctions that there is considerable variation within Scots itself, with distinct regional varieties found across the country. In different regions, there are different features that will be overt and covert, and that may have different levels of social stigma attached to them (see e.g. Smith Reference Smith2001).

Recalling Labov's (Reference Labov, McNair, Singer, Dobrin and Aucon1996) proposed reasons as to why ‘intuitions may fail’, detailed in section 2.3 above, the social context of Scots and English in Scotland therefore provides us with an ideal testing ground to tease apart the most important factors. Features of Scots’ morphosyntax of course vary in frequency, but there are also distinctions between highly local features and region-wide non-standard features, as well as standard (English) ways of ‘saying the same thing’, allowing us to explore the role of regionality. There is also detailed existing research into the salience and perception of many grammatical variables across Scots varieties (Aitken Reference Aitken and Trudgill1984), allowing us to take account of how social stigma may affect judgments. Attempting to combine these factors leads us to the choice of features investigated in this study, detailed in section 4. Before this, we present SCOSYA and the data that will be used in this article.

3.2 Overview of SCOSYA

The Scots Syntax Atlas (SCOSYA) builds on the growing enterprise of dialect syntax atlases, e.g. SAND (Barbiers & Bennis Reference Barbiers and Bennis2007), ASIS (Benincà & Poletto Reference Benincà and Poletto2007), the Nordic Syntax Database (Lindstad et al. Reference Lindstad, Nøklestad, Johannessen and Vangsnes2009) and YGDP (Zanuttini et al. Reference Zanuttini, Wood, Zentz and Horn2018). While these atlases were built primarily from judgment data, SCOSYA also incorporates the practice of a number of dialect syntax corpora, e.g. AAPCAppE (Tortora et al. Reference Tortora, Santorini, Blanchette and Diertani2017), gathering both judgment data and spoken data from the same speakers.Footnote ⁷ In total, SCOSYA combines 275 hours of sociolinguistic interview data with over 100,000 acceptability judgments across 200 morphosyntactic phenomena found in varieties of Scots. The data were collected between December 2015 and July 2018 from 530 speakers in 146 locations across Scotland (figure 1).

Figure 1.

All locations in the SCOSYA data

We divide the data into 15 broad geographic regions, based on traditional dialectological areas of Scotland (Grant Reference Grant1931; Aitken Reference Aitken and Trudgill1984; Johnston Reference Johnston and Jones1997; Miller Reference Millar2007). See scotssyntaxatlas.ac.uk/linguists-atlas for more information.

The data were collected by community insider fieldworkers, as insider status is key to gaining access to the relevant non-standard forms (Labov Reference Labov1972). The fieldworkers were responsible for recruiting participants using a standard set of sociolinguistic criteria (Labov Reference Labov, Baugh and Sherzer1984): participants were born and brought up in the area; had not spent any significant time away; had parents who were from the area; and had not gone on to higher education.Footnote ⁸

Dialect syntax atlases have tended to focus on older speakers to capture the ‘traditional’ dialects of a particular language or region. When younger speakers have been included, such as in the Nordic Dialect Corpus, there is no direct comparison with older speakers in the same community. In SCOSYA, pairs of participants were recruited in two age groups: 65+ and 18–25 (thus four participants in each location), in order to systematically investigate change in apparent time. Each pair generally consisted of friends or family members, and were usually also friends or family members of the fieldworker. Data collection was conducted in participants’ homes to encourage relaxed, naturalistic data in a comfortable setting (Labov Reference Labov, Baugh and Sherzer1984). By following these criteria in the data collection process, the SCOSYA data hones in on participants’ most vernacular speech, rather than a more formal style that might elicit the Standard Scottish English end of their speech continuum. We now detail the two data collection methods used.

3.3 The judgment task

The first part of the data collection process was an acceptability judgment task using a questionnaire developed by the SCOSYA team. The questionnaire targeted key non-standard morphosyntactic forms. All were features of Scots dialects; we use the term ‘non-standard’ to indicate the range of variation within the forms, from hyperlocal dialect features to more general English ‘vernacular universals’, that were tested. For example, some features were noted in the literature to occur throughout Scotland, such as possessives or determiners where standard English would have a bare noun (6). Other examples were attested for particular dialect areas, such as gonnae imperatives (7), attested in Glasgow. Some pandialectal forms found in varieties of English both across the UK and beyond were also included, such as non-standard preterit verb forms (8).

1. (6) I'm going to my bed.

2. (7) Gonnae you leave us alone!

3. (8) I seen that last week.

A total of 182 features were tested with all participants. Additional items of specific interest were judged in certain locations only, so each questionnaire contained approximately 200 examples. In total, over 100,000 judgments were given.

The questionnaire was delivered in an adapted version of the interview method (Barbiers & Bennis Reference Barbiers and Bennis2007). Each target example was presented following a short context which included relevant referents and contextual information (9):

1. (9) You're telling me you saw me and a friend earlier. You say:

   I saw youse earlier on.

The fieldworker read out the contexts and examples to the first participant in each pair. The participant verbally rated each example on a five-point Likert scale (figure 2), indicating their intuitions about whether/how the sentence would be used in their community. Each point on the scale was labelled, and participants were given a copy of the scale to refer to throughout the task. Scores were recorded by the fieldworker. The first participant subsequently adopted the role of ‘fieldworker’ and delivered the questionnaire to the second participant.

Figure 2.

SCOSYA five-point Likert scale

3.4 The interview

The second part of the data collection process was a standard one-hour sociolinguistic interview, conducted between the pairs of speakers in each age group, with the fieldworker present. Due to the insider status of the fieldworker, the Observer's Paradox was reduced as far as possible, and conversation was generally relaxed and open (see further in Labov Reference Labov, Baugh and Sherzer1984).

Example (10) demonstrates the kind of talk that arose in these interviews, with bold indicating some of the non-standard forms:

The recordings were text-to-speech transcribed in Transcriber (Barras et al. Reference Barras, Geoffrois, Wu and Liberman2001). The full corpus of over 3 million words is available at scotssyntaxatlas.ac.uk/about/accessing-the-spoken-corpus

4.1 Selecting the variables

We focus on three variables (11a–c) which differ across geographic and social dimensions in Scots. Unless indicated, all examples are taken from the SCOSYA corpus.

Choosing to investigate these features allows us to differentiate the roles of factors suggested by Labov (Reference Labov, McNair, Singer, Dobrin and Aucon1996) as leading to the ‘failure’ of intuitions. Regarding frequency, while we do not have prior information on the relative frequency of variants, we do know about their likely absolute frequency. Variable contexts where need + PAST can possibly occur are known to be ‘low frequency’ (Strelluf Reference Strelluf2022) but possible contexts for periphrastic div may be much higher. Negative concord (NC) may be situated somewhere in between.

The features also vary with regard to regionality. Div is highly local within communities, while need + PAST is supralocal across Scots varieties and NC is supralocal across Englishes. Crucially, all also have a ‘standard’ variant, which speakers may also have access to.

Finally, the features vary with regard to their salience and social stigma. Need + PAST is recognised as a covert feature of Scots (e.g. Aitken Reference Aitken and Trudgill1984:21). It is therefore unlikely to be salient, nor stigmatised. We know div is a socially salient feature of Tyneside English (Rowe Reference Rowe2007: 362; Pichler Reference Pichler2009: 290); however, there is little evidence regarding the salience of div in Scots. The features defining div as salient for Tyneside varieties of English – grammaticalisation to set phrases, strong usage by young working-class men (Rowe Reference Rowe2007; Pichler Reference Pichler2009) – may not be relevant for div in Scots. Our third feature, NC, is one of the most socially salient variants in any variety of English (Cheshire Reference Cheshire1982; Labov Reference Labov2001; Smith Reference Smith2001; Anderwald Reference Anderwald and Iyeiri2005; Blanchette Reference Blanchette2017). Aitken (Reference Aitken and Trudgill1984:25) categorises NC as a Scots vulgarism, subject to ‘explicit condemnation’, while Smith & Holmes-Elliott (Reference Smith, Holmes-Elliott, Christensen and Jensen2022) find speakers in Buckie change their rates of NC if speaking to a community insider as opposed to an outsider. This controlled usage highlights its salience, and the associated stigma.

We now provide a more detailed description of what is already known about each of these features, before presenting the results of the SCOSYA corpus search for each and contrasting it with the judgments.Footnote ⁹

4.2 need + PAST

4.2.1 Background

In English, a passive construction can be embedded under a matrix verb. Usually, the infinitival form to be combines with the past participle (12a). It is, however, also possible to have a present participle follow the matrix verb (12b).

There is a third variant available in some varieties in which certain matrix verbs (need, want and like (Murray & Simon Reference Murray and Simon2002)) combine directly with a past participle (12c–e).Footnote ¹⁰

We adopt the term need + PAST (Strelluf Reference Strelluf2020) for this construction, as we focus purely on cases with need.

need + PAST constructions have been attested in some US Englishes (Stabley Reference Stabley1959; Murray, Frazer & Simon Reference Murray, Frazer and Simon1996; Maher & Wood Reference Maher and Wood2011; Duncan Reference Duncan2021), and Irish English (Montgomery Reference Montgomery, Tyler Blethen and Wood1997). In Scots, need + PAST is understood as a feature of Scots generally (Brown & Millar Reference Brown and Millar1980; Montgomery Reference Montgomery, Tyler Blethen and Wood1997); we might thus expect it to be attested and judged highly across Scots varieties.

4.2.2 need + PAST: spoken data

All three variants are used in the SCOSYA spoken corpus:

Table 1 shows how these are distributed across the data. Table 1 reveals that need + PAST (13a), the non-standard form, makes up over 57 per cent of examples. In this case, the non-standard variant is produced at the highest rate in the corpus.

Table 1.

Proportion of need constructions in the SCOSYA corpus

Figure 3 plots where need + PAST occurs. The faded circular dots indicate communities where conversation was recorded, but no attestations of need + PAST were found. The black dots indicate communities where need + PAST was attested. Figure 3 shows that attestations of need + PAST are spread across Scotland. We note that absence of a form does not necessarily mean no use, but instead may arise from the general infrequency of any of the three constructions with need.

Figure 3.

Locations with attestations of need + PAST in SCOSYA

4.2.3 need + PAST: judgment data

Participants judged one example of a need + PAST construction.

1. (14) The postman pulls up in his van and it's filthy. You say:

   His van needs washed.

Recall that participants judged items on a 1–5 scale. ‘5’ indicated the participant would ‘definitely say’ it and it was ‘very natural’, while ‘1’ indicated they ‘wouldn't say’ it, and it was ‘very unnatural’. We treat locations where two or more participants gave an example 4 or 5 as ‘acceptable’, following e.g. Zanuttini et al. (Reference Zanuttini, Wood, Zentz and Horn2018) and Thoms et al. (Reference Thoms, Adger, Heycock and Smith2019). We do not treat the data as continuous, and report median and mode statistics throughout.

Participants generally gave the example in (14) high ratings. The median and mode scores were 5, while the individual-level acceptance rate (percentage of speakers who rated the example 4 or 5) was 80 per cent. Figure 4 shows the widespread acceptance, with dark dots indicating locations where at least two participants rated the example 4 or 5.

Figure 4.

His van needs washed, accepted by at least two participants

Comparing figures 3 and 4 demonstrates that speakers’ intuitions align with respect to need + PAST. It is both accepted and used throughout Scotland, despite the low absolute frequency of the construction in the corpus.

4.3 Div for do

4.3.1 Background

In some varieties of Scots, div varies with periphrastic do in the present tense in all subject types except third-person singular (15a–e).

Div can be used in negatives (16a), questions (16b) and tags (16c) but not imperatives (16d).

In terms of geographic spread, div is attested in the North East (Smith Reference Smith2000; Dictionary of the Scots Language 2004) and the Borders.

4.3.2 Div: spoken data

In the corpus, div is found in emphatic positives (17a), questions (17b) and tags (17c).

There are over 15,000 possible contexts in which div could alternate with do. Table 2 shows the relative frequency of the two forms.

Table 2.

Proportion of periphrastic do/div in the SCOSYA corpus

Despite thousands of contexts where div could be used, it is very rarely used. Figure 5 plots the attestations. The faded circular dots indicate communities where conversation was recorded, but div was not attested. The black dots indicate communities where div was attested. Figure 5 shows the majority of attestations are in the North East. In the Borders, we also find attestations. The distribution of div in the SCOSYA corpus aligns with what we would expect based on previous reports of the form.

Figure 5.

Locations with attestations of div in SCOSYA

4.3.3 Div: judgment data

Participants judged one example of div in an emphatic polarity context.

1. (18) You're sitting down with a cup of tea and a scone. You say:

   I div like a scone!

Figure 6 shows the distribution of judgments. In figure 6, the dark dots indicating acceptance are geographically clustered. While div was not rated highly across the whole data set (median and mode both 1), in the North East, there is a median and mode of 5, while in the Borders the mode is 5 and the median is 3.5.

Figure 6.

I div like a scone, accepted by at least two participants

Just as with need + PAST, the spoken data in figure 5 and the judgment data in figure 6 align with respect to div, suggesting reliable intuitions regarding this feature.

4.4 Negative concord

4.4.1 Background

Standard English includes two ways of marking negation with indefinites. With sentential negation (19a), the negative marker not or -n't appears after the verb, and scopes over an indefinite any- form. Alternatively, the negative is incorporated into the indefinite, realised as a no- form (19b). A further alternative exists in non-standard dialects of English: negative concord (NC).Footnote ¹¹ In (19c), negation is marked on the negative marker -n't and the indefinite, nothing.

Despite denigration of forms such as (19c) over centuries, NC is widespread and ‘recurs ubiquitously all over the world’ (Chambers Reference Chambers1995: 242), with numerous contemporary reports (e.g. in Britain, Hughes & Trudgill Reference Hughes and Trudgill1979; Cheshire Reference Cheshire1982; Coupland Reference Coupland1988; Beal Reference Beal1993; Edwards Reference Edwards1993; Anderwald Reference Anderwald and Iyeiri2005). Examples like (19c) have been reported across Scots varieties (Macaulay Reference Macaulay1991; Cheshire et al. Reference Cheshire, Edwards and Whittle1993; Smith Reference Smith2001; Anderwald Reference Anderwald and Iyeiri2005; Macafee Reference Macafee2011), although at varying rates (e.g. 49 per cent in the North East (Smith & Holmes-Elliott Reference Smith, Holmes-Elliott, Christensen and Jensen2022), but 8 per cent in Glasgow (Childs Reference Childs2017)). Based on previous research, we may expect NC would be produced and judged acceptable in Scots varieties, but perhaps at variable rates across communities.

Note that there are two forms of contracted negative marker in Scots, the broad Scots form -nae and the (Standard Scottish) English form -n't. Speakers who have -nae also have -n't (Smith, Durham & Richards Reference Smith, Durham and Richards2013):

For the purposes of NC, -n't and -nae have the same syntactic properties (see Thoms et al. Reference Thoms, Adger, Heycock, Jamieson and Smith2023), and we include examples with both contracted negative markers.

4.4.2 Negative concord: spoken data

In the judgment task (section 4.4.3 below), we discuss judgments for NC with two postverbal indefinites: nothing (21a) and nowhere (21b). We also focus on these two forms in the spoken data, though note the corpus also contains examples of NC with other indefinites, such as nobody, none and no NP.

Table 3 shows NC by indefinite type.Footnote ¹²

Table 3.

Proportion of negative concord by type in the SCOSYA corpus

Turning first to NC with nothing (21a), figure 7 shows the distribution of the 148 tokens. The faded circular dots indicate communities where conversation was recorded, with no attestations of NC with nothing. The black dots indicate communities where NC with nothing was attested. Figure 7 shows widespread use throughout Scotland. As with need + PAST, we cannot rule out NC with nothing in the communities with no attestations due to low absolute frequency.

Figure 7.

Locations with attestations of NC with nothing in SCOSYA

There was only one attestation of NC with nowhere, from the North East (21b), and the total percentage of NC in the nowhere/anywhere case is only 1 per cent. From the corpus data, then, we see variation in NC depending on the indefinite.

4.4.3 Negative concord in the SCOSYA judgment data

All participants judged examples of NC where sentential negation was combined with nothing (22a) and nowhere (22b).Footnote ¹³

We will firstly discuss the example with nothing in (22a).

Cannae see nothing

There is a great deal of variability in the ratings for (22a). It was not rated highly across the regions (mode=1, median=3). Nevertheless, it had a 43 per cent acceptance rate (ratings of 4 or 5). Figure 8 presents an acceptability map for this example, with black dots indicating communities in which 2 or more participants gave the example 4 or 5.

Figure 8.

I cannae see nothing, accepted by at least two participants

It is clear from figure 8 that the moderate acceptability rate cannot be explained by variation across place; although there are some areas with attestations in almost every community (e.g. Tayside & Angus), there is not the strong geographic clustering of judgments we saw with div (see section 4.3.3).

Didnae see it nowhere

The example in (22b) was not rated highly across the regions (mode=1, median=2), with a 21 per cent acceptance rate. Figure 9 presents an acceptability map for this example, with black dots indicating communities in which 2 or more participants gave the example 4 or 5.

Figure 9.

I didnae see it nowhere, accepted by at least two participants

The map in figure 9 shows some geographic clustering. Although there are communities with acceptance dotted around e.g. Fife and Stirling, there is a particular concentration of black dots in the North East. There, the median is 4 and mode is 5, with an acceptance rate of 56 per cent. This geographic concentration of acceptance is also in the region where we find the singular attestation of NC with nowhere in the corpus.

4.5 Summary

We have examined three variables from SCOSYA: need + PAST, div for periphrastic do and NC. Each of the variables has a different pattern when comparing spoken data to judgments. Need + PAST is produced and accepted across regions. Div for do is geographically circumscribed to the North East and Borders in the corpus, and this is matched in the judgments. For NC with nothing, results are mixed, with attestations across regions but inconsistent acceptability in the judgment task. Here, it seems the results of judgment tasks diverge from the usage picture. However, NC with nowhere exhibits a clustering of acceptability around the single attestation in the North East. In section 5 we will revisit the social context of Scots and Scottish English in Scotland presented in section 3.1 to propose reasons for the varying levels of match/mismatch in the data.