ABSTRACT
Dialect grammar has been much less studied than phonology and vocabulary. At least as significant a factor in the relative paucity of dialect grammar studies – perhaps more significant, because it is more insidious – is the very elusiveness of the data. At least as important in making grammatical features hard to discern is their functional role in speech acts. Grammatical elements are linked to the propositional content of language more integrally than phonological elements. They are the conveyors of the message in a discourse or conversation. Once grammatical forms are identified as dialectal variants, it is true that their infrequency does then pose problems for analysis. However, this problem can often be solved, at least partially, methodologically. Linguistic interviews can be designed in such a way as to maximize opportunities for the occurrence of particular forms. More grammatically sophisticated treatments of non-standard dialects are needed, and so is a more empirically based approach to grammatical theory.
