1. What is dialect? — Revisiting the Midland

Simon, Beth Lee; Murray, Thomas E.

doi:10.1075/veaw.g36.02mur

Cited by 7 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…These possibilities require psycholinguistically informed experiments to test. They would have interesting potential analogues in other frequent constructions like BE+PAST for progressive aspect in Northern British Englishes (‘I was sat at my desk’; Stange, ), or want +PREPOSITION (‘The baby wants up’; Murray & Simon, , pp. 26–27; Benson, ) and positive‐ anymore (‘There's a lot to do downtown anymore’; Strelluf, ; Youmans, ) in the US Midland.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This band of positive responses corresponds closely to the North Midland (using McDavid's labels) or Midland (in Labov et al., ; I use ‘Midland’ in this sense throughout this article). Murray and Simon (, pp. 20–21) extend this analysis to include needs +PAST as one of 17 grammatical variables that ‘define and validate a Midland variety of American English’.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

needs+PAST PARTICIPLE in regional Englishes on Twitter

Strelluf

2020

World Englishes

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

show abstract

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

needs+PAST PARTICIPLE in regional Englishes on Twitter

Strelluf

2020

World Englishes

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…These Midlands features are often perceived as nonstandard and Southern-sounding by people from north and west of that region as it possesses some features associated with Southern U.S. English (Murray and Simon 2006). That is to say, Washingtonians may be hearing some Midlands features in eastern Washington and perceive them to be "Southern" (or possibly "rural").…”

Section: Categorymentioning

confidence: 94%

"Seattletonian" to "Faux Hick": Perceptions of English in Washington State

Evans¹

2011

American Speech

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article describes a subset of data from a larger project investigating perceptions that Washington State residents have about English spoken in their state to explore dialect variation and the social and regional evaluation of it in this under-studied region. Respondents were asked to draw on a map of Washington the places where they believe people speak "differently" and to give a label for that way of speaking. The results indicate that respondents perceive eastern Washington as very different from the rest of Washington. The analysis of the results uses Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to create maps of areas associated with labels provided by the respondents, such as "country," "Spanish," "slang," and "gangster." It is suggested here that, in addition to providing insight on respondents' underlying theories of language and culture, these perceptions point to linguistic and sociocultural questions that should be explored further in Washington.The english spoken in the western United States has not often been the subject of sociolinguistic investigation; thus, relatively little is known about the English in this region. Research, such as that conducted in California (e.g.,

show abstract

“…(7) The child was scared on the swing and said she wanted off. Murray & Simon 2006). In addition, within the Midland, variation in the reported use of want + prepositional adverb in different styles appears to exceed the variation by social class, contradicting the current assumption that the range of stylistic variation is always smaller than the range of social variation (e.g., Bell 1984;Preston 1991).…”

mentioning

confidence: 51%

“…In addition, the geographic patterning and the lack of social stratification of want + prepositional adverb provide clear evidence that the construction is spreading from the Midland into other dialect areas as a change from below. Moreover, the historical and contemporary concentration of want + prepositional adverb in the Midland supply additional evidence for the Midland as a distinct dialect area defined by morpho-syntactic features, rather than a transition area between the North and the South (e.g., Murray & Simon 2006). Furthermore, the unusual pattern of stylistic variation that exceeds the range of social variation of want + prepositional adverb in the Midland calls for a reassessment of the relationship between social and stylistic variation, or at the very least more studies of stylistic variation of variables that appear not to show social variation.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Everyone Wants In

Benson

2009

Journal of English Linguistics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The regional, social, and stylistic distributions of want + prepositional adverb (e.g., I can move if you want by) are poorly understood in spite of a long history of documentation and the inclusion of one form— want off—in major dialectology projects . This article investigates the acceptability of a range of forms of want + prepositional adverb in the United States and finds a wider than expected regional distribution, differences in the acceptability of different forms, and in the dialect area that boasts the greatest concentration of use—the Midland—little variation across social variables yet greater variation across styles. The author argues that the findings support the use of acceptability judgments in the study of morpho-syntactic features; indicate change from below in progress with the spread of want + prepositional adverb from the Midland; give additional evidence for an independent Midland dialect area; and call into question current assumptions about the relationship between social and stylistic variation.

show abstract

1. What is dialect? — Revisiting the Midland

Cited by 7 publications

References 0 publications

needs+PAST PARTICIPLE in regional Englishes on Twitter

needs+PAST PARTICIPLE in regional Englishes on Twitter

"Seattletonian" to "Faux Hick": Perceptions of English in Washington State

Everyone Wants In

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About