We reconstruct the inherent variability found in mid-nineteenth-century American English by drawing on a corpus of semi-literate correspondence, the Corpus of American Civil War Letters (CACWL), rich in non-standard grammatical features. The primary focus is on a comparison of morpho-syntactic variability (was/were variation and restrictive relativization strategies) in letters written between 1861 and 1865 by Civil War soldiers originating from Massachusetts and Alabama. Key findings include the elevated rate of was-levelling, particularly in the Alabama letters; the variable effect of the type-of-subject constraint on the selection of non-standard was; and the scarcity of WH-relativizers in restrictive relative clauses. Contextualization of these findings in relation to an ongoing quantitative investigation of grammatical variation in four additional states (Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina and South Carolina) represented in the CACWL provides further evidence of structured heterogeneity in Civil War correspondence as well as the sensitivity of variable grammatical processes to regional differences. Taken together, our findings demonstrate how judicious use of the CACWL can leverage new insights into nineteenth-century American English.

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北方与南方：十九世纪美国英语语法变异的区域模式

我们通过利用具有丰富非标准语法特征的半文学对应语料库，即美国内战信件语料库 (CACWL)，重建了 19 世纪中叶美国英语中固有的可变性。主要重点是比较来自马萨诸塞州和阿拉巴马州的内战士兵在 1861 年至 1865 年间写的信中的形态句法变异性（曾经/曾经是变异和限制性相对化策略）。主要发现包括提高水平的水平，特别是在阿拉巴马州的信件中；学科类型约束对非标准选择的变量效应为；以及限制性关系从句中 WH 相对化词的稀缺性。将这些发现与 CACWL 中代表的另外四个州（宾夕法尼亚州、俄亥俄州、北卡罗来纳州和南卡罗来纳州）的语法变异进行定量调查相关的情境化提供了内战通信中结构化异质性以及变量敏感性的进一步证据区域差异的语法过程。总之，我们的研究结果表明，明智地使用 CACWL 可以利用对 19 世纪美国英语的新见解。