ABSTRACT
This chapter considers three grammatical areas where the vernacular has, to some extent at least, resisted the process of standardisation. The three areas are relativizers, verb morphology and a-prefixing. The rationale for the choice of these grammatical systems is that they are interesting windows on processes of change, especially the pace and direction of change and the shifting notions of which forms are regarded as standard. The spoken relative pronoun system has shown considerable variability historically, both in the use of non-standard relativizers and in non-standard use of standard relativizer forms, or at least what would now be regarded as non-standard use. In both the Mayhew Corpus (MC) and the Bolton/Worktown Corpus (BWC), all the elements of the present-day standard relativizer system are to be found, though whose is quite rare in both corpora and which is rare in the BWC.
