The Yale Grammatical Diversity Project approaches the empirical domain of North American English ... more The Yale Grammatical Diversity Project approaches the empirical domain of North American English from the perspective of generative microcomparative syntax. In addition to eliciting judgments from speakers of particular varieties, we also conduct large-scale surveys, map the results of those surveys geographically, conduct statistical tests taking geography and other social variables into account, and look for theoretically significant linguistic correlations. In all cases, we do this with the primary goal of understanding variation between speakers at the individual level. While our goals and methodologies are informed by our theoretical perspective, we expect that our work and results will be of interest to linguists working in other frameworks and even to the public more generally. This article outlines the goals and methodologies of the project and describes in broad strokes some of the results obtained so far, as well as some of the ways we have shared our findings with others, inside and outside academia.
We introduce the Southern Dative Presentative, an understudied construction that varies across sp... more We introduce the Southern Dative Presentative, an understudied construction that varies across speakers of American English. We discuss similarities and differences between this construction and the better-studied Personal Dative construction, and compare the Southern Dative Presentative to similar constructions cross-linguistically. We then present the results of a nationwide acceptability judgment survey administered on Amazon Mechanical Turk. The results show that Southern Dative Presentatives are alive and well in southern dialects of American English. In the process, we also illustrate the usefulness of Amazon Mechanical Turk (and similar crowdsourcing platforms) for the study of dialect variation in the domain of syntax.
The Yale Grammatical Diversity Project approaches the empirical domain of North American English ... more The Yale Grammatical Diversity Project approaches the empirical domain of North American English from the perspective of generative microcomparative syntax. In addition to eliciting judgments from speakers of particular varieties, we also conduct large-scale surveys, map the results of those surveys geographically, conduct statistical tests taking geography and other social variables into account, and look for theoretically significant linguistic correlations. In all cases, we do this with the primary goal of understanding variation between speakers at the individual level. While our goals and methodologies are informed by our theoretical perspective, we expect that our work and results will be of interest to linguists working in other frameworks and even to the public more generally. This article outlines the goals and methodologies of the project and describes in broad strokes some of the results obtained so far, as well as some of the ways we have shared our findings with others, inside and outside academia.
We introduce the Southern Dative Presentative, an understudied construction that varies across sp... more We introduce the Southern Dative Presentative, an understudied construction that varies across speakers of American English. We discuss similarities and differences between this construction and the better-studied Personal Dative construction, and compare the Southern Dative Presentative to similar constructions cross-linguistically. We then present the results of a nationwide acceptability judgment survey administered on Amazon Mechanical Turk. The results show that Southern Dative Presentatives are alive and well in southern dialects of American English. In the process, we also illustrate the usefulness of Amazon Mechanical Turk (and similar crowdsourcing platforms) for the study of dialect variation in the domain of syntax.
Each paper in this volume is, for reasons of space, presented in excerpted form, and is preceded ... more Each paper in this volume is, for reasons of space, presented in excerpted form, and is preceded by an introduction that provides some background and a small set of relevant references. Each paper is also followed by a set of questions intended to encourage the student to explore new lines of thought.
Oxford University Press is thrilled to announce the publication of Micro-Syntactic Variation in N... more Oxford University Press is thrilled to announce the publication of Micro-Syntactic Variation in North American English, edited by Raffaella Zanuttini and Laurence R. Horn. Providing a systematic look at minimal differences in the syntax of varieties of English spoken in North America, the book makes available for the first time 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 nine 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). These chapters delve into the syntactic analysis of individual phenomena, and the editors' introduction and afterword contextualize the issues and explore their semantic, pragmatic, and sociolinguistic implications.
Uploads
Papers by Raffaella Zanuttini
The nine 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). These chapters delve into the syntactic analysis of individual phenomena, and the editors' introduction and afterword contextualize the issues and explore their semantic, pragmatic, and sociolinguistic implications.