Comparative
A comparative study provides a conspectus of the linguistic usage at a certain period in time. At the planning stage for such a survey two aspects relating to its range have to be decided. The first of these has to do with determining the territorial extent of the field investigations. This should not prove difficult. The survey may cover an agreed area of the country with the remaining parts being apportioned to be investigated by other centres, or it may be the intention to cover the whole country from the working base. In a case of this kind, as happened in Ireland, practical co-operation between interested centres in providing financial resources and trained staff can ensure that one centre is able to plan and undertake such a survey for the whole country.15
The second aspect relates to the scope of what is to be collected in each location chosen for investigation. This depends on the kinds of variation in usage to be surveyed. Basic to all these types obviously is the regional variation, but within this divergence the differences related to social dimensions and age groups are included in the wider ranging surveys. Criticism was often made of the earlier surveys in that they confined themselves to the speech of the older generation and to one social group, frequently a rural informant. 16 In The Linguistic Atlas of the United States it was maintained, however, that 'all population centres of any importance are regularly included, and, in principle, all social levels are represented' .17
After deciding the scope of the survey, the collecting of data as in the case of the other studies must meet with the criterion of adequacy of evidence for what is proposed. Sufficient data must be obtained from each place of investigation to provide information for the ensuing analysis. In order to evaluate the kinds of phonological encoding likely to occur regionally this concept of the adequacy of evidence for each set of data collected was formulated thus:
'Care was taken to provide sufficient material for a rather full description, both phonemic and phonic, of the pronunciation of each informant, and hence for determining the regional and social distribution of the phonic variations of all the phonemes of American English, and for establishing differences in phonemic structures. '18
In the later stages of analyzing the data 'the essential soundness of the expectation' was proved. 19
As we are again in search of natural speech-forms the data must be collected from the language of common interaction within the community. For this reason:
'Regional and local expressions are most common in the vocabulary of the intimate everyday life of the home and the farm -not only among the simple folk and the middle class but also among the cultured ... Food, clothing, shelter, health, the day's work, play, mating, social gatherings, the land, the farm buildings, implements, the farm stocks and crops, the weather, the fauna, and the flora -these are the intimate concern of the common folk in the countryside, and for these things expressions are handed down in the family and the neighbourhood that schooling and reading and a familiarity with regional or national usage do not blot out. 20
- Barry, M. v. 'The methodology of the tape-recorded survey of Hiberno-English speech' in Barry, M.V. (Ed.) Aspects of English Dialects in Ireland, Vol.1; Belfast: The Queen's University; 1981; pp.22-3
- Chambers, J.K. and Trudgill, P. Dialectology; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 1980; pp.33-5 and Petyt, K.M. The Study of Dialect; London: Andre Deutsch; 1980; pp.154 et.seqq.
- Kurath, op.cit., p.l1
- Kurath, H et al. Handbook of Linguistic Geography of New England; Rhode Island: Brown University; 1939: p.148
- Kurath, H. and McDavid Jr., R.I. The Pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; 1961; p.2
- Kurath, H. A Word Geography of the Eastern United States; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; 1949; pp.9-10
