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Full-Text Articles in Syntax
Covert Determiners In Appalachian English Narrative Declarative Sentences, William Oliver
Covert Determiners In Appalachian English Narrative Declarative Sentences, William Oliver
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
In this thesis, I explore the syntax and semantics of covert determiners (Ds) in matrix subject determiner phrases (DPs) with definite specific interpretations. To conduct my investigation, I used the Audio-Aligned and Parsed Corpus of Appalachian English (AAPCAppE), a million-word Penn Treebank corpus, and the software CorpusSearch, a Java program that searches Penn Treebank corpora. My research shows that Appalachian English contains a linguistic phenomenon where speakers drop the D, replacing overt Ds with covert Ds, in definite specific DPs. For example, where Standard English speakers say The doctor came by horseback, Appalachian speakers may use a covert D …
Get My Syntax On, Heidi Lei
Get My Syntax On, Heidi Lei
Yale Working Papers in Grammatical Diversity
In this paper, I describe and analyze an instance of micro-syntactic variation in American English, a construction I refer to as get my X on. There is considerable flexibility in the construction, involving the types of determiners allowed, the phrasal verbs used, and most notably, the structure of the DP my X. In Standard American English, the X following a possessive pronoun is generally restricted to nouns. However, in this construction, X can be a lexical verb like sing, teach, or even celebrate. Some speakers of African American English accept only the bare verb, rejecting …