Preface.
Bernd Kortmann
Since the 1980s, but especially over the last ten years or so, the study of the grammar of English dialects has been very much on the rise after more than a century of neglect in English dialectology and dialectology, in general. Witness, in particular, Trudgill and Chambers (1991), Milroy and Milroy (1993), and, on a global scale, Kortmann and Schneider (2004). Apart from these and several other publications related in spirit, however, the vast majority of publications on the grammar of English dialects concentrates on just one particular phenomenon in one particular dialect or dialect area, is based on a very small database and purely descriptive. Moreover, the small size of the available databases often makes it very difficult to formulate valid descriptive generalizations. Virtually non-existent in English dialectology are systematic comparative studies of individual grammatical subsystems across a selection of dialects (like comparative studies of the tense and aspect systems, pronominal systems, relativization or complementation patterns, etc.). Exceptions in this respect form the sociolinguistic studies by Tagliamonte and her research team (e.g. Tagliamonte 1999, 2002, 2003), and the contributions, especially the regional and global synopses, in Kortmann and Schneider (2004). However, useful as the synopses are in providing general orientation, they can be no more than very useful starting-points for systematic comparative analyses of individual phenomena of dialect grammar.
