ABSTRACT

What has been discussed in the preceding chapters will now be summarized. In this first section, the description of standard English in Chapter 2 will serve as the foil for comparing the investigated standard and non-standard features of the negative system of present day (spoken) British English. It must be stressed again that non-standard speech is not understood as comprising traditional dialect speakers – these have always constituted a minority, and especially today certainly do not represent the average nonstandard speaker. Instead, our main interest has focused on the majority of speakers today. As we have seen, newer, non-standard constructions are used with varying frequencies throughout the population across all dialect areas, albeit with sometimes striking regional differences.