Syntax Commons^™

Mapping The ‘Alternative One’ Construction In American English, Guilherme M. C. Pereira

Yale Working Papers in Grammatical Diversity

Alternative one is an understudied construction accepted by speakers of some American English dialects in sentences like (i), where the word one appears immediately after a disjunction.

(i) I need to talk to John or Malcolm, one.
'I need to talk to John or Malcolm, one or the other.'

(Montgomery 2006:152)

In this paper, I present maps of acceptability judgments of this construction in the U.S., using data from a survey administered by the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project in 2020 and 2021. The maps confirm the geographical distribution claimed for alternative one in the Dictionary of American Regional English (Cassidy …

Variations On Defining A Dialect Region, Sasha Lioutikova

Yale Working Papers in Grammatical Diversity

This paper explores various methods of defining a dialect region, using syntactic constructions characteristic of the American South. We consider three important characteristics of such a method: place, feature, and measure. ”Place” details how data points should be grouped, ”feature” details which data points should be used, and ”measure” details how the data should be analyzed. While we may not claim one method as superior to any other, this research can provide insight into how different techniques of characterizing geographic variation may affect the resulting dialect regions.

Datives, Data And Dialect Syntax In American English, Jim Wood, Raffaella Zanuttini

Linguistics Faculty Publications

In this paper, we present a detailed case study of a number of dative constructions that vary across speakers of American English. We show how geographical maps of acceptability judgments can be used to shed light on the syntactic structures underlying those judgments. Those structures can then be used to refine our understanding of syntax more generally, in this case relating to the features of argument-introducing heads. We provide novel support for the low applicative analysis of the Personal Dative construction, on the grounds that this analysis falls in line with a general, somewhat surprising conclusion about Southern American English: …