Vernacular Grammar(s) of Mid-Nineteenth Century Northwestern South Carolina: A Study of Civil War Letters

The book discusses the grammar(s) of selected Civil War soldiers hailing from three counties in Northwestern South Carolina. It is in two parts, of which the first constitutes the theoretical background; the second presents the results of an analysis of the compiled corpus. Both parts comprise three chapters and are linked by Chapter Four. Chapter One places Northwestern South Carolina within the linguistic landscape of the American South. Chapter Two describes the body of existing studies on nineteenth-century Englishes of the South and touches upon the debate on the beginning of Southern American English. Chapter Three deals with Civil War vernacular correspondence and its validity for linguistic scrutiny. Chapter Four functions as a transition between the theoretical and analytical parts, and considers corpus structure, methodological issues, and a selection of features subject to linguistic scrutiny. Chapter Five elaborates on two grammatical phenomena: present tense agreement between subject and verb and variation in the past tense be paradigm. This discussion is followed by Chapter Six, where variation among principal parts of irregular verbs and consonant-cluster reduction attested among past tense forms of regular verbs are presented. Chapter Seven, the last chapter, analyses variation from idiolectal and community grammar perspectives.