Do Anglian dialects of Old English have a partial pro-drop property?
Chapter 3 deals with the question of whether Anglian dialects of Old English, in contrast to the West Saxon literary standard, had a partial pro-drop property. The chapter investigates this ‘dialect-split hypothesis’ by means of descriptive statistics and inferential statistical modelling. It is also noted that what has been interpreted as diatopic variation could also be representative of other types of variation, and consequently the variables of translation status, period, and genre are also investigated, in addition to dialect. The primary analytical techniques used in this chapter are generalized fixed-effects logistic regression modelling and random forests of conditional inference trees. The chapter concludes that the dialect-split hypothesis must be considered falsified.