• Fromont, Robert & Hay, Jennifer. 2003-2023. LaBB-CAT. Version 20230719.1156 [software]. New Zealand Institute of Language, Brain and Behaviour, University of Canterbury. New Zealand. https://labbcat.canterbury.ac.nz/system/
• Jones, Mark. 2007. ‘Glottals and Grammar: Definite Article Reduction and Morpheme Boundaries’. Leeds Working Papers in Linguistics and Phonetics 12.
• Posit Team. 2023. R Studio: Integrated Development Environment for R. Posit Software. PBC. Boston, MA. http://www.posit.com/
• Rupp, Laura & Page-Verhoeff, Hanne. 2005. Pragmatic and historical aspects of Definite Article Reduction in northern English dialects. English World-Wide 26:3. 325–346.
• Tagliamonte, Sali. & Roeder, Rebecca. 2009. Variation in the English definite article: Socio-historical linguistics in t’speech community. Journal of Sociolinguistics 13:4. 435–471
• Hollmann, W. & Siewierska, A. 2011. ‘The status of frequency, schemas, and identity in Cognitive Sociolinguistics: A case study on definite article reduction’. Cognitive Linguistics 22:1.

This poster presents the results of an ongoing study into Definite Article Reduction (DAR) in Lancaster, north-west England. DAR is a salient feature of northern British English speech, where the word “the” is omitted or reduced to one of several forms including [t] [θ], [ʔ] or [∅] (Jones, 2007).

Importantly, previous studies have shown that DAR is not used exclusively, with usage rates in different parts of northern England ranging from as high as 71% (Petyt, 1985) to as low as 19.1% (Tagliamonte & Roeder, 2009). The literature also shows certain grammatical and phonetic environments are more favourable for DAR than others (Rupp & Page-Verhoeff, 2005; Jones, 2007; Tagliamonte & Roeder, 2009; Hollmann & Siewierska, 2011).

Although much of this previous work has been carried out a relatively small scale, Tagliamonte & Roeder (2009) carried out a larger scale study into the grammatical and phonetic constraints of DAR in the city of York, north-east England. This work follows that variationist approach and will offer more recent results from the north-west of England.

The data analysed has been drawn from recorded oral history interviews and focus on the small, historic city of Lancaster, in the far north-west of Lancashire. The data is drawn from 3 male and 3 female participants, born in the city between 1883-1942.

The interviews were transcribed using Elan with all tokens of the definite article being coded as full, [t] [θ], [ʔ] or [∅]. The data was cleaned, leaving around 2500 full definite article tokens and 450 reduced definite article tokens for analysis. Tokens were identified and tagged using the Stamford Part-of-Speech (POS) tagger in Labb-Cat (Fromont & Hay, 2003-2023). The results downloaded for analysis in R (Posit Team, 2023).

Initial results suggest a wide variability in DAR usage in Lancaster of between 6.7% - 76.0%. This variability will be discussed in detail in relation to the linguistic environments in which DAR is present, specifically in relation to the following research questions:

RQ1. What are the different variants of DAR in Lancaster?

RQ2. Do different linguistic environments favour or disfavour DAR in Lancaster? The linguistic environments to be studied will follow Tagliamonte & Roeder (2009), namely:
• Preceding phonetic segment
• Preceding grammatical category
• Type of following noun
• Following phonetic segment
• Discourse parallelism
In addition, given the findings of Hollmann & Siewierska (2011), the token frequency of following nouns and prepositions will also be explored.

RQ3. How does DAR pattern with usage of the full definite article in a macrosocial framework? Diachronic change will be analysed by stratifying the results by generation (year of birth) and gender.

This work forms part of the larger “Lancashire Voices” project into linguistic variation and change in Lancaster over a period of approximately 120 years.