Grammatical Variation and Change in Industrial Cape Breton

• Main Author: Gardner, Matt Hunt
• Other Authors: Tagliamonte, Sali A., Linguistics
• Format: Thesis
• Language: unknown
• Published: 2017
• Subjects: Cape Breton Island; Dialectology; English Dialects; Language Variation and Change; Nova Scotia; 0636; Breton Island
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1807/80940

The following dissertation explores four changes in progress in a large mixed corpus of speech from Cape Breton Island. Its goal is to establish evidence for a generational genetic relationship between Cape Breton English and Scottish/Irish English, if any. Findings indicate that Cape Breton English is instead more similar to Inland Canadian English with respect to both quantity and kind for these changes. This paper also explores the processes of transmission and diusion on Canadian English's eastern edge. It contributes to the growing body of literature on change in the English stative possessive, deontic modality, future temporal reference, and quotative systems. Ph.D.