As drunk as muck. The Role and Logic of Similes in English Dialects on the Basis of Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary

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Notes

1 Cf. the suggestive title of the famous book by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), Metaphors We Live by.

2 On the role of similes in standard English, cf. Pierini (2007) and Norrick (1986).

3 The EDD has been digitised by a government-funded project called SPEED (Spoken English in Early Dialects) at the English Department of the University of Innsbruck. The project started in 2006 and will run at least until March 2011. For a more detailed description of the project, see Markus and Heuberger (2007) and Markus (2008).

4 In addition to Wright's EDD, some other sources of similes, such as Elizabeth Mary Wright's book Rustic Speech and Folk-Lore of 1914, with lists of striking examples, have been used manually.

5 For an interpretation of similes as an outcome of socio-cultural factors, cf. Peters (2007).

6 I have excluded such “camouflaged” similes (also cf soot-black, dead-drunk) in this investigation, because they cannot formally be identified (e.g. vs. half-drunk, which is not a simile).

7 The difference between tenor and ground, though important in discourse studies, does not play much of a role for the rest of the paper as I do not suggest to analyse full clauses, but to focus on phrases consisting of the ground (some critics have referred to it as tenor, cf. Weinrich (1976, 291–341)), the comparative marker and the vehicle.

8 In the interface of EDD Online, there is a button for simile in the semantic sub-section of Labels, but it has wrongly been based on the string “comp.”, which was misinterpreted to stand for “comparative” but, in fact, means “compound”. This blunder will be corrected as soon as possible.

9 For a general survey of different markers, cf. Claridge (2009, 93–94).

10 The txt-version of the EDD used as a basis for this query admittedly has some spelling mistakes. But these do not affect the validity of our findings.

11 If we allow for a few hundred obviously invalid results, e.g. with a mark of punctuation between the first and the second as, the number of examples is still over 3,000 and thus suitable for further analysis.

12 Thus, a passage from Lincolnshire “as loosefooted as I have been” cannot be addressed as a fixed expression.

13 Strictly speaking, the correlation in the phrase x such as y is more specific than in as x as y, because x is not compared with y, but illustrated by y as an example. However, both similes and illustrative examples have the common purpose of visualising a notion.

14 Formal features are alliteration or other deviant features of sound. Semantic features lie in the “fanciful or unrealistic” awkwardness of a comparison, mentioned above (see the Introduction section and the section on Markers of Similies as well as McArthur 1992, 935).

15 There are, however, 65 findings with not or no immediately preceding.

16 I.e. without the EDD being tagged. Our present work on the Dictionary includes tagging of the different parts of the entries in the proper way.

17 I am aware that vowels, too, alliterate (e.g. in as anxious as any [Wright]), but their frequency in this function is extremely low compared to that of consonants. Moreover, word-initial vowels in English dialects often came “in disguise”, i.e. affected by some language change.

18 It is not in all cases. Checking the examples I have found that like before as if is very often pleonastic.

19 The examples are mainly in the citations of the EDD. Since this pleonastic use was seen with scepticism by one colleague in the audience of the Leeds conference Methods XIII, I quote, in additon to the example of demonstration in Table 1, four further cases in point. AGIF: “like as agif it” (i.e. like as as [sic!] if it …;); AS: “like as this here”; OVER: “it be like as this”; PRICKER: “like as mickle breid twoastan”.

20 Horizon: 0L 2R.

21 The full table of 140 samples, down to a frequency rate of 4, had to be released for lack of space.

22 Readers who find this remark contentious are referred to the fact that modern refill systems for inkjet printers come in black and the three colours red, blue and yellow.

23 Cf. Markus (1994, 2006).

24 It is also striking and a confirmation of this theory that the plurisyllables on our list mostly end in vowels (12 occurrences -y, 1 occurrence -ow) or “week” consonants, namely liquids (limber) or nasals (common) so that allegro speech would allow for the elision of the redundant syllables. For example, as happy as encourages rhythmical alternation by being pronounced [əs'hæpjəs]. Also, of the disyllabic adjectives involved in similes most are followed by non-predetermined vehicles, i.e. the indefinite article is avoided after tenors of the type as happy as.

25 Norrick (1986, 41–42), on the basis of the Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs (1970), has given a detailed cognitive explanation of stock grounds.

26 For the impact of rhythm on grammar in historical English, cf. Schlüter (2005).

27 Of these the first 22 had to be dropped since they were Wright's words rather than words from his sources.

28 Cf. Cobham Brewer n.d. [1969], sub lazy: “This Ludlum was a famous sourceress of Surrey, who lived in ‘Ludlum Cave’. She kept a dog, noted for its laziness.”

29 In the w. Yks. phrase as thick as Dick and Leddy; Dick is a generic use of the proper name (<Richard).

30 With 0L2R. The search produced 31 entries, five of which were useless.

31 The variant drunk like only privided one questionable result and has, therefore, been neglected.

32 At present the EDD does not allow to find all phrases with drunk as, because Wright often does not repeat key-words of phrases but uses hyphens instead.

33 This was not done earlier because it is very labour-intensive. The attribution to dialect now in Table 6 is intended as a testcase.

34 Cf. the Middle English poem The Owl and the Nightingale.

35 Another, phonological option is that owl is a folk-etymological variant of yawl. Inserted <y> is quite common in the EDD in word-initial position before vowels.

36 The striking example of a jingling simile as listed in Table 2 above, as smug as a bug in a rug, is – typically enough – testified by a source of the late nineteenth century (1889).

37 Such query routines are planned for the near future.

38 Generally they are not proverbial, but some of them are, for example, whiter than the snow.

39 On the role of agrarianism during the time of Late Modern English and its change in the later nineteenth century, cf. Historical Atlas of Britain (1981, 184–187 and 202–203).

40 His father was a drunkard so that little “Joe” had to make up for deficits in the family's income by being a child-worker; cf. details in E.M. Wright's biography (1932).