Going' Stockport: Omission of prepositional to in Greater Manchester

Abstract

Despite being the regional dialect of the second-largest urban conurbation in the United Kingdom, Manchester English is one of the least studied dialects of British English. This paper investigates a morphosyntactic feature of Manchester English, omission of prepositional to. The study used a combination of written surveys and recorded interview sessions to elicit grammatical acceptability judgements from a stratified random sample of teenage school pupils in two schools in Stockport, Greater Manchester. The study examined various potential grammatical contexts for preposition omission as well as the social context behind its usage. The investigation found a positive correlation between grammatical acceptability ratings from respondents and socioeconomic status, measured using the proxy indicator of Free School Meals eligibility. Grammatical acceptability ratings combined with interview recordings, provided a basis from which to describe the grammatical distribution of preposition omission.