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Full-Text Articles in Anthropological Linguistics and Sociolinguistics
Investigating Language Variation And Change In Appalachian Dialects: The Case Of The Perfective Done, Julia Horton, Anna Muraco
Investigating Language Variation And Change In Appalachian Dialects: The Case Of The Perfective Done, Julia Horton, Anna Muraco
Honors Thesis
The perfective done (“She done tended the garden”) is an often-overlooked grammatical feature specific to relatively few dialects of American English, most prominently seen in Appalachian dialects. While the perfective done has been described in detail by linguists since the 1970s, and there has been a demonstrated decline in the frequency of use of the perfective done among Appalachian dialect speakers in the past fifty years, there is very little existing scholarship that investigates an empirical basis for the claim that this long-term variation in the use of done can be considered a true language change-in-progress. The present research reviews …