Right Dislocation in Northern England: Frequency and Use - Perception meets Reality

The process of right dislocation has long been recognized in English as a primarily vernacular feature available to speakers of all varieties, but concrete sociolinguistic discussion about its frequency of occurrence and which factors constrain its use are rare. Moreover, English has variants which repeat the operator either before or after the dislocated NP or pronominal particle, (e.g. She's got a very good degree has Julie), which makes it unlike most of the languages with comparable right dislocation forms. These variants are either ignored completely in right dislocation literature or considered on their own. The present analysis aims, therefore, to provide a holistic view of right dislocation strategies. Starting with a classification of the various right dislocation strategies used in the North of England, where this variant is most often reported to be found, this paper will present a quantitative analysis of right dislocation in a corpus of York speech. The analysis will demonstrate that, while right dislocation forms are used by York speakers (young and old, male and female), with respect to overall frequency right dislocation is in fact far more rare than reports make it out to be, and that its social distribution is rather unexpected in some respects.