Micro-Syntactic Variation in North American English
Raffaella Zanuttini and Laurence Horn
Abstract
By comparing linguistic varieties that are quite similar overall, linguists can often determine where and how grammatical systems differ, and how they change over time. The goal of this work is to provide a systematic look at minimal differences in the syntax of varieties of English spoken in North America. This book makes available a range of data on unfamiliar constructions drawn from several regional and social dialects, data whose distribution and grammatical properties shed light on the varieties under examination and on the properties of English syntax more generally. The contributions c ... More
By comparing linguistic varieties that are quite similar overall, linguists can often determine where and how grammatical systems differ, and how they change over time. The goal of this work is to provide a systematic look at minimal differences in the syntax of varieties of English spoken in North America. This book makes available a range of data on unfamiliar constructions drawn from several regional and social dialects, data whose distribution and grammatical properties shed light on the varieties under examination and on the properties of English syntax more generally. The contributions collected in this volume fall under a number of overlapping topics: variation in the expression of negation and modality (the so don’t I construction in eastern New England, negative auxiliary inversion in declaratives in African American and southern white English, multiple modals in southern speech, the “needs washed” construction in the Pittsburgh area), pronouns and reflexives (transitive expletives in Appalachia, personal dative constructions in the Southern/Mountain states, long-distance reflexives in the Minnesota Iron Range), and the relation between linguistic variation and language change (the rise of “drama so” among younger speakers, the difficulty in establishing which phenomena cluster together and should be explained by a single point of parametric variation).
Keywords:
varieties of English,
personal dative,
multiple modals,
drama so,
negative auxiliary inversion,
so don’t I,
parametric variation,
long-distance reflexives,
transitive expletives,
needs washed
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2014 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199367221 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2014 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199367221.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Raffaella Zanuttini, editor
Yale University
Laurence Horn, editor
Yale University
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