LL-L: "How do you say ...?" LOWLANDS-L, 18.OCT.1999 (03) [E]

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From: G Halliday [G.Halliday at xtra.co.nz]
Subject: LL-L: "How do you say ...?" LOWLANDS-L, 18.OCT.1999 (01) [E]

 "Ian James Parsley" <parsley at highbury.fsnet.co.uk> wrote

> Well, the reason I asked was that there seems to be a tendency in Scots,
more
> like other West Germanic languages except English, to put some part of the
verb
> phrase to the end. So in Ulster that sentence would *always* be "A set tha
> computer up" - however, I've seen the alternative in Scotland a few times.

I think Scots does not naturally shift the particle to the end of the
clause.

Scots A pu' oot the licht.
Eng I put the light out.

Hughes and Trudgill - English Accents and Dialects mention this in their
intro.

> This explains the tendency, particularly with mutative verbs (i.e. those
> representing a change of state), for Ulster Scots to move the participle
to
> after the object in the perfect tense (thus "A hae tha wark daen" rather
than
> ?"A hae daen tha wark").

This sounds like normal English usage where there is perhaps some aspectival
distinction between

I'll have the work done by 11.
I'll have done the work by 11.

I Ireland there is sometimes  a calque on the Irish construction
Ta an obair dheanta agam
I have the work done.
which may play a role - I'm not sure if Ulster Scots has some nuance

It also explains the common use of the
> Scots tag "sae hit is/so it is", "sae the ir/so they are" and so on: this
tag is
> seldom used where part of the verb phrase is final anyway (?"A am, sae A
am",
> ?"A hae tha wark daen, sae A hae").

The unlikelihood of this sentence comes from the final hae in my Scots.

Aa hae the wark din sae aa have.

sounds normal.

"Sae it is" (stressed "hit" sounds impossible) has perhaps become almost a
separate pragmatic particle, sae it has.

Geordie Halliday

----------

From: Eldo Neufeld [greneuf at interchange.ubc.ca]
Subject: "How do you say ...?"

Regarding the question "Did ah set the computer up" or "Did ah set up the
computer," the following tale was told me recently:

A stranger is walking across the Yale campus, encounters a student, and asks,
"Can you tell me where the library's at?"  The student looks at him and says,
"Don't you know you're not supposed to end a sentence with a preposition?"  The
stranger returns the look and says, "All right, tell me where the library's at,
----- asshole!"

Eldo Neufeld
4040 Blenheim St.
Vancouver, BC   V6L 2Y9
Tel: (604) 738-4378
e-mail: greneuf at interchange.ubc.ca

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