It's just one of this things

An open seminar from the Department of Language and Linguistics, with external speaker Dr E Jamieson from the University of Southampton

In the first part of this talk, Dr Jamieson introduces the Scots Syntax Atlas (SCOSYA). SCOSYA is a major new resource for the study of syntactic variation and change, bringing together over 100,000+ acceptability judgments and 275 hours of recorded conversation to build a searchable atlas of present-day Scots varieties. 

In the second part of the talk a case study is presented on the syntax of demonstratives in Scots. Demonstratives like this and that indicate how far from a speaker an object is. English distinguishes between this/that for one object and these/those for multiple objects, but in northern Scots, this and that can be used regardless of how many objects there are. 

Drawing on data from SCOSYA, Dr Jamieson explores alternative strategies that northern Scots speakers use in contexts.