ABSTRACT
This chapter examines some cases of grammatical variation in Somerset English. Analysis of the evidence shows that certain contexts have old dialectal forms more frequently than others. The chapter presents evidence to the effect that grammatical diffusion is regulated by stress, syntactic position and sentence modality. The analysis of pronoun exchange, then, shows that the distinction between full and enclitic subject pronouns is still operative in Somerset English. To test the hypothesis that the factors are relevant to the implementation of new forms, data from the Survey of English Dialects (SED) were also analysed. These data come from seven south-western counties. To work out the order of implementation of the standard forms, the SED data were arranged in terms of possible grammars. The grammars constructed on the basis of the SED thus support the view that weak affirmatives are the most favourable to standard forms.
