Allison Burkette

<jats:p>This paper discusses the linguistic, social, and geographic distribution of a-prefixing data in the Linguistic Atlas Project (LAP) of North America. Over 3800 instances of the a-prefix were extracted for analysis from the LAP interview data of 1527 speakers from across the United States, collected between 1931 and 2006. While the LAP a-prefix data do not generally deviate from patterns observed in the sociolinguistic literature, they do offer a more nuanced picture of infrequent prefixed forms, including uncommon constructions and verbs that appear as a-prefixed forms less frequently. A-prefixers in LAP tended to be white men, although it should be noted that between 30-47% of the female speakers in four of the surveyed LAP projects also used this feature. The geographic distribution of the feature suggests that the a-prefix is not Southern so much as it is Eastern, with pockets of lesser and greater usage as one moves westward across the country. Additionally, this paper casts the a-prefix as a rural phenomenon, rather than as a strictly Southern one, which opens the door to discussions of the feature as a means of indexing participation in (or affinity for) a rural lifestyle. Overall, this paper demonstrates that LAP data are a tremendous resource and a key piece of the puzzle of understanding regional and social variation.</jats:p>

This article offers a preliminary comparison of available data from three regional surveys of English: the Linguistic Atlas Project, the Survey of English Dialects, and the Linguistic Atlas of Scotland, taking as its focus the survey item 'kindling'. Intended as a pilot study, the following discussion highlights the benefits and challenges of combining data from these surveys. This study suggests that a comparison of atlas-style survey data would be productive and that these surveys, in addition to valuable information about variation in language, contain a great deal of cultural information. Finally, this article suggests that the 'kindling' data provide evidence of a "material effect"; in other words, the data suggest that physical surroundings have an influence on the vocabulary of different regions. keywords: language variation, linguistic atlas, language and material culture Kindling, as many readers likely know, refers to the small pieces of wood used to start a fire. The method many of us presently use to start a fire at home consists of flicking the switch that turns on a gas fireplace, though starting a fire (be it in a fireplace, an outdoor fire pit, a grill, or a campfire) is something of an art form, perhaps even one that verges on being lost. Fire-starting vocabulary, however, shows no signs of being lost; the terms kindle and tinder, for example, have been co-opted as brand names for Amazon's series of e-readers and the popular dating app, respectively. 1 In both cases, the adoption of a fire-starting moniker makes sense, given the application of the following definitions from the online Oxford English Dictionary (OED): kindle, v.1 1. With reference to a fire, flame, or flammable substance. a. trans. To start or light (a fire); to set fire to, ignite (something flammable). b. intr. To begin to burn; to catch fire; to burst into flame. 2. trans. fig. a. To arouse, give rise to, or inflame (a feeling, emotion, etc.) b. To incite, inflame, or stir up (a person, mind, thought, etc.); to make ardent or eager. [revised for the OED3 in Sept. 2016]

This paper explores the cultural and historical forces that created variation in terms for " cemetery " , including links between language and material culture, using cemetery terms found within two Linguistic Atlas data sets to demonstrate how colonial influence, cultural changes, and physical locations contribute to linguistic variation. Speakers' lexical choices in the 1930s still show the effects of the religious and social climates of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Northern and southern colonial trends were still influencing regional language use several hundred years later. Furthermore, for the LANE data we find that the physical location of historic cemeteries has an effect on speakers' use of specific lexical items.