The use of needs with a past participle (as in ‘The car needs washed’) has been identified as a feature of the US Midland, and of Englishes in Scotland, Northern Ireland, and northern England. However, linguists have generally not been able to study needs+PAST in natural language data. This study reports from a large corpus of needs+PAST productions built from tweets in 20 US cities, 17 UK cities, and 13 other cities. It confirms needs+PAST as a productive feature of Scotland, Belfast, Newcastle, and the US Midland, and supports claims that the construction spread via immigration. In doing so, it validates studies based on elicitations of grammaticality judgments, while also demonstrating new techniques to study low‐frequency linguistic variables. It provides quantitative evidence of the extent to which a settler variety of English may leave an imprint of itself over several centuries, and of the durability of regional dialect boundaries.
This research examines pre-/l/ allophones of vowels in five lexical sets—GOOSE, FOOT, GOAT, STRUT, and THOUGHT—in Kansas City. It builds an acoustic profile from 5507 tokens drawn from interviews with 67 Kansas Citians born between 1955 and 1999. Results reveal a variety of overlap patterns among all five vowels, with the most widespread being overlap between the pre-/l/ allophones of FOOT, STRUT, and GOAT. Acoustically, overlap patterns generally do not show a trend of change in apparent time. However, responses to minimal pairs reveal substantial apparent-time increases in judgments of “close” or “same.” Speakers appear to adjust their productions of vowels to match their minimal pair judgments. The interaction of these productions and judgments indicates a different profile for these five vowels than has been observed in other communities and suggests that some of these vowels have become phonemically ambiguous in Kansas City.
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