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Urban Matters: Current approaches in variationist sociolinguistics
Edited by Arne Ziegler, Stefanie Edler and Georg Oberdorfer
[Studies in Language Variation 27] 2021
► pp. 141–158

Urban-rural dimensions to variable -body/-one

The case of Ontario, Canada

ORCID logo | University of Toronto
ORCID logo | University of Toronto

English pronominal quantifier doublets (some/any/every/no- + -body/-one) have been variable since Middle English. Previous research (D’Arcy et al. 2013; see also Biber et al. 1999) shows varying patterns of -body and -one by region and quantifier, with an overall slow progression toward -one and possible eventual obsolescence of -body that is highly dependent on social and geographic correlates; the -body variant is retained in rural areas, no matter their location and distance from the large urban centre of Toronto, yet with notable consistency and parallels in the underlying constraints. These findings align with the cascade model (Trudgill 1974, 2011; Labov 2003) and models of transmission versus diffusion of change (Labov 2007; Tagliamonte and Denis 2014).

Keywords: pronominal quantifier, language variation, language change, Canadian English
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Historical background
  • 3.Synchronic situation: Canadian English
    • 3.1Distributional analysis
    • 3.2Geographic distribution
    • 3.3Statistical modelling
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 16 December 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.27.06jan
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