Dialect variation in Scottish Gaelic nominal morphology: A quantitative study

This paper presents a dialectometric analysis of Scottish Gaelic morphology, with a focus on the noun phrase, using previously unpublished data from the Linguistic Survey of Scotland. Fifty-five morphological features were extracted across 201 survey points, and the data subjected to a variety of an...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Glossa (London) 2020-12, Vol.5 (1), p.1-31
Main Authors: Iosad, Pavel, Lamb, William
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Celtic studies
Cluster analysis
dialectology
dialectometry
Dialects
Linguistics
Morphological analysis
Morphology
Noun phrases
Phonetics
Phonology
Polls & surveys
Quantitative analysis
Scottish Gaelic
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Summary:This paper presents a dialectometric analysis of Scottish Gaelic morphology, with a focus on the noun phrase, using previously unpublished data from the Linguistic Survey of Scotland. Fifty-five morphological features were extracted across 201 survey points, and the data subjected to a variety of analyses, including cluster analysis, regression, and correlation analysis. We establish that the Gaelic noun system shows robust diatopic (i.e. geographical) variation; this challenges previous assertions in the literature, which describe Gaelic morphosyntax as geographically uniform. In addition, we argue that our dialectometric results provide an insight into the grammatical structure of the language that is not easily achievable through the analysis of individual varieties. In particular, we argue that the results highlight a dissociation between morphological categories such as case and gender and their morphophonological exponents, which are particularly complex in Scottish Gaelic. The paper thus serves as a proof of concept for the use of dialectometric findings in a theoretical context.
ISSN:2397-1835
2397-1835
DOI:10.5334/gjgl.1023