Background data for: The morpho-syntax of Scottish Standard English: Questionnaire-based insights

Dataset abstract This dataset contains tabular files with data on the currency of four morpho-syntactic features in Standard Scottish English and Standard Southern British English: quotative LIKE, epistemic MUSTN'T, extended uses of the progressive, and YOUSE as a second person plural pronoun. It is drawn from the Bamberg Survey of Language Variation and Change (BSLVC; Krug & Sell 2013). Usage ratings are provided by young, educated speakers, who indicate on an ordinal scale how many speakers in their home country would use a particular feature (embedded in a carrier sentence). The response options are \"no-one\", \"few\", \"some\", \"many\", \"most\", and \"everyone\", and ratings are collected for two different registers: casual speech (informal conversation among friends) and (semi-)formal writing (email to a former teacher). The data include 43 British informants (21 male, 22 female; mean age 21) and 61 Scottish informants (24 male, 37 female; mean age 21). Each participant provided two ratings (spoken vs. written) for a single sentence.
Abstract of related publication With empirical research on Scottish Standard English showing a bias towards phonology, the aim of the current study is to contribute to the morpho-syntactic documentation of this variety. Relying on Standard Southern British English for comparison, we concentrate on four eWAVE features, on which the varieties have been noted to diverge: (i) youse as a second person plural pronoun, (ii) extended uses of the progressive, (iii) epistemic mustn’t, and (iv) quotative like. We use questionnaire data, where respondents indicate how many speakers in their home country use a particular feature. Ratings are elicited from 43 English and 61 Scottish participants (mostly university students) for two usage contexts, speech and writing. Our findings corroborate expert ratings in eWAVE and show that the reported currency of all features is higher in Scottish Standard English, albeit to varying degrees. Our study draws attention to the complementary potential of questionnaire data in World Englishes research.