Alexander Bergs

2nd completely revised and updated ed.
ISBN: 978-3-89586-317-2
Verlag: LINCOM

Buch, Englisch, Band 242, 80 Seiten

Reihe: Languages of the World/Materials

This book is intended as a concise and up-to-date introduction to Modern Scots, very much in the vein of the classical, but now somewhat outdated textbooks Grant & Main-Dixon (1921) and Wilson (1926). Modern Scots is often regarded as one end of a dialect continuum that has English Standard English at the opposite end and Scottish Standard English somewhere in the middle. There do seem to be (sociolinguistic) reasons, though, for treating Modern Scots as an independent language system, rather than as a dialect of English. Nevertheless, Modern Scots lives in close contact with English and is (linguistically and ideologically) strongly influenced by it, so that there is (still) an eminent danger of erosion and loss, despite Scots being increasingly used in literary texts and the media. Outside literature, Modern Scots can be most frequently heard in Glasgow, parts of the Scottish Borders, and Aberdeenshire.

This study opens with a brief sketch of the history of Scots and its present geo- and sociolinguistic state. Further chapters deal with the phonology and orthography of Scots, its morphology, syntax, and lexicon. Furthermore, it offers a brief introduction to features of stylistic variation and discourse management in Scots. Throughout the text a large number of examples from both literature and real life (spoken) Scots are given. Three short sample texts, a selected webliography, and a comprehensive bibliography conclude this volume.

This second edition has been completely revised, thoroughly corrected, and updated. Some sections have been revised in the light of new studies and data, and numerous examples from the Scottish Corpus of Text and Speech (SCOTS) corpus have been added.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Scots, Modern

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Einzelne Sprachen & Sprachfamilien

Über Autor(innen)

Alexander T. Bergs is Assistant Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Düsseldorf. His main research interests include the history of English, language variation and change, sociolinguistics, and morphosyntax. He is the author of Social Networks and Historical Sociolinguistics and editor of Constructions.