This volume offers a selection of papers originally presented at the Eleventh International Conference on Methods in Dialectology held at the University of Joensuu, North Karelia, Finland in 2002. The conference's theme has been taken as the title of the book, and each of the essays included here explores the influence of borders on linguistic behavior. For readers who might assume this collection to represent only the tradition of dialect geography it is important to note that the editors had a rather expansive sense of “border” in selecting the essays, and as a result the contributors display a broad range of ways of conceptualizing borders and their influence. The papers are grouped thematically according to the types of borders they examine: Those in Part I deal with borders in the usual geographical sense, those in Part II explore borders that are more social or cognitive in character, and those in Part III investigate borders between languages. The editors open the book with an introduction that sketches the contents of each essay.
Part I, “Dialects across political and historical borders,” begins with Peter Auer's exploration of borders affecting German. Auer focuses on the ideological impact of national borders on dialect and language differentiation. He points to Germany's border with the Netherlands as an example of linguistic divergence where the traditional dialect continuum has largely given way to a clear separation of Dutch and German. Turning to Germany's southern borders with Switzerland and Austria, Auer argues that political boundaries operate just as strongly in the divergence of German dialects. Crucially, Auer sees this divergence as a product of the cognitive construct of national identity rather than as a consequence of reduced communication.
Varieties of German are also examined in contributions by Larissa Naiditch and Raphael Berthele. Naiditch presents an account of the development of the sound system of Mennonite Low German, an insular dialect whose speakers have historical ties to Russia. One of the unusual features of this variety is its series of palatalized consonants, and Naiditch considers whether these consonants can be attributed to contact with Slavic languages. Berthele also touches on contact phenomena in a comparative study of spatial expressions in Swiss German, Romansh, French, and Italian. The approach is informed by cognitive semantics, and Berthele identifies differences in the structural strategies preferred by German speakers and Romance speakers as well as between speakers of standard and nonstandard varieties of German.
Cross-linguistic comparison also characterizes the study from Sandra Clarke & Gunnel Melchers, who examine the use of pulmonic ingressive articulation in the production of certain discourse particles. This feature is found in languages across the North Atlantic and Baltic, including Finnish, Danish, English, and Scots Gaelic, and the authors suggest it has diffused by language contact. Applying a variationist analysis to data from Swedish and Newfoundland English, Clarke & Melchers investigate the sociolinguistic distribution and discourse functioning of the ingressive particles.
The final paper in Part I offers a narrower linguistic and geographic focus by examining grammatical variation in six “relic” communities in the British Isles. In this study Sali Tagliamonte, Jennifer Smith, & Helen Lawrence seek to provide data on four grammatical features that might be useful in establishing historical trans-Atlantic connections to North American dialects. For various reasons, three of these features are shown to be poor or problematic diagnostics of trans-Atlantic links, leaving only the fourth – the well-studied verbal –s – as a viable comparative feature.
A shift toward a more sociolinguistic focus is seen with Dennis Preston's contribution, which opens Part II, “Dialects across social and regional borders.” Preston reviews an impressive variety of research examining the influence of attitudes and beliefs on speech production as well as perception. He shows, for example, how participation in ongoing sound changes is connected to a sense of local loyalty in certain rural Michigan communities. This essay builds on Preston's previous work arguing for “language ideologies and folk beliefs as important considerations in the general study of language variation and change” (123).
A similar case for expanding our research horizons is made by Ronald Macaulay, who asks, “Can we find more variety in variation?” He responds in the affirmative, and drawing on data from a class-stratified sample of Glasgow speakers, he demonstrates some unexpected patterns in the use of discourse features. Often the results are unexpected not in the sense that they run counter to prior expectations, but rather that they involve features (e.g., the particle oh, the degree adverbs very and quite) that one might not expect to pattern at all.
The theme of language ideologies introduced in this section by Preston also runs through Finnur Friđriksson's intriguing contribution, “On ‘dative sickness’ and other linguistic diseases in Modern Icelandic.” Friđriksson examines a set of grammatical changes involving case marking. These changes have attracted substantial attention in media and education circles, where they are viewed as a threat to the health of the language (as suggested by the medical metaphor in the chapter title). Using conversational speech and written data from three generations of Icelanders, Friđriksson finds that not only are the feared nonstandard usages very rare, but also the generational comparison gives no indication that they are on the increase.
The final two papers in Part II remind readers of the conference's titular emphasis on methodology. Vincent J. van Heuven, Renée van Bezooijen, & Loulou Edelman present an acoustic study of an apparent change in progress affecting /εi/ in Dutch. The authors express reservations about vowel normalization routines commonly used in sociophonetic studies to allow for cross-subject comparisons, and they demonstrate an alternative approach that allows them to track the movement of the vowel under study across their sample of 32 speakers. The linguistic focus turns grammatical in the paper by Joan C. Beal & Karen P. Corrigan, which concludes this section of the book. Beal & Corrigan frame their work as part of an attempt to establish morphosyntactic criteria for distinguishing British vernaculars, and they are particularly interested in identifying characteristically Northern features. To this end they examine relativization strategies in electronic corpora of transcribed speech collected in Newcastle and Sheffield. While they do arrive at some tentative conclusions about the observed patterns in the data, the study ultimately demonstrates the many complications that researchers must consider in performing a responsible quantitative analysis of almost any grammatical variable.
Part III, “Dialects across language boundaries,” contains three papers exploring the role of language contact on certain grammatical structures. Ruth King presents a carefully argued critique of the concept of structural borrowing, using evidence from Prince Edward Island French. This variety is unusual in allowing preposition stranding, a feature that seems clearly to have resulted from the influence of English. King argues, however, that the syntactic pattern has come as a consequence of the lexical borrowing of English prepositions rather than as a direct syntactic borrowing.
Attention to grammatical detail is essential to King's analysis, as it is to Patricia Ronan's treatment of the after-perfect, a feature of Hiberno-English usually traced to the influence of Irish. Ronan demonstrates that, contrary to some accounts, this structure is not used only to mark “hot news” (e.g. “A man is after getting shot in the street”). Indeed, she questions whether the after-perfect should be approached as a single unified category and suggests that its functions can be understood only by considering its distribution in opposition to other dialectal and standard perfect variants in the grammatical systems of individuals.
The collection concludes with J. L. Dillard's critique of recent scholarship on the history of African American Vernacular English (AAVE). Among the targets in this often acerbic review of the literature are a variety of researchers who focus their search for the origins of AAVE features on “colonial English.” Dillard argues against so narrow a focus and notes in particular the historical connections between Black slaves and American Indians. Such connections support Dillard's belief that AAVE has its origins in a maritime pidgin, since such a contact variety was likely to emerge as a lingua franca in that social context.
Overall, the quality of the research presented in this volume is quite high, and many of the contributors are leading figures in the field. The editors say nothing about the criteria used in selecting these papers for publication from the dozens presented at the conference, though in addition to seeking first-rate scholarship they seem to have taken care to represent the range of research approaches practiced under the banner of dialectology today. Almost any reader of this journal will find something of interest here. Nevertheless, this book is unmistakably a collection of conference papers, and many of the chapters focus heavily on presenting research findings and thus leave little space for reflective discussion. In these cases, readers, like conference attendees, are presented lots of interesting data followed with an often cursory conclusion referencing directions for future work. Readers might experience some frustration because, unlike conference attendees, they are not allowed a question period. Fortunately, most of the research in this collection stems from promising ongoing projects that likely will bear publications allowing for fuller consideration of the issues raised by their findings.
