J. K. Chambers’s scientific contributions

Vernacular universals arise in the context of sociolinguistic dialectology as generalizations about intralinguistic variation, and their universal status is emerging from analyses of putative crosslinguistic counterparts. The external factors that underlie them have distinctive social and functional aspects. I exemplify them by examining one of them, default singulars, a specific type of copula nonconcord. In English, default singulars occur as invariant was (as in They was too sick to travel). Socially, default singulars appear to develop naturally in the absence of contact models, as dramatically illustrated by Schreier's work (2002) on Tristan da Cunha. Functionally, they appear to result from stripping away inflectional redundancies, especially when they involve complex look-up mechanisms. Vernacular universals, unlike UG-based generalizations, are identified partly in terms of their social patterning, in so far as there are regularities in the way they are socially embedded, and this added dimension may provide a concrete basis for coming to grips with them.