Need + Past Participle in American English

What this construction needs is generalized

“…It was assumed that the residents of Florida would be unfamiliar with the needs construction. This assumption was based on maps showing attestations of the needs construction presented by Murray et al (1996) and by surveying the linguistic intuitions of native Floridians who had never been to the Northern Midlands dialect region of the United States.…”

“…Kaschak and Glenberg (2004) have reported an initial study of the processing involved as readers are repeatedly exposed to (and learn to comprehend) a novel syntactic construction in their native language: the needs construction (e.g., "The meal needs cooked"). 1 These experiments were a rough analogue to situations in which comprehenders come into contact with a feature of an unfamiliar dialect of English (in this case, Upper Midwestern adults were exposed to a construction from the Northern Midlands dialect of American English-most famously, around Pittsburgh; Murray, Frazier, & Simon, 1996). Beyond simply showing that readers can learn to comprehend a novel construction, the results of Kaschak and Glenberg's (2004) experiments suggested that the participants' learning of the needs construction was at least somewhat general.…”

Representing American Speech

“…At the time, we conceived of our investigation as a contribution to the ongoing discussion concerning the existence of a distinct Midland dialect in the United States. In the process of data collection, we ended up with provocative material on two related constructions, want + V-en (The baby wants picked up, The cat wants fed) and like + V-en (The dog likes petted, Babies like cuddled) and decided our investigation must include these Simon 1999, 2000). During this same period, we also looked at the regional variation in the lexicalized pronunciation of suite 'set of furniture', /swit/ versus /sut/ (Simon and Murray 1999).…”

“…has gone from unmarked usage among those born before 1910 to restricted use among those born after 1930 (Frazer 1990), and I rarely hear it used today by anyone under 50. On the other hand, acceptance studies by Tom Murray and Beth Simon suggest that the use of elliptical constructions like The grass needs mowed and The cows need fed are widely acceptable (Murray, Frazer, and Simon 1996;Murray and Simon 1999). I have begun to note their regular use in McDonough County newspapers.…”

Environment Prototypicality in Syntactic Alternation

“…Unlike better-studied alternations, there are few proposed constraints on the needs doing alternation; in fact, the only proposals in the literature are three speculative constraints from Lynne Murphy (cited in Murray, Frazer, and Simon 1996). We tested these constraints and two of our own devising, but counterexamples to each could be found in the British National Corpus or on …”