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Language Variation in Appalachia: A Special Case of Sentence Meaning
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In: ASA Annual Conference (2019)
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Abstract:
“Yeah, but didn’t many die like they is now seem like.” (from Tortora et al. 2017) This paper provides experimental evidence for a unique sentence meaning property observed in Appalachian and other Englishes. In the quote above, a speaker laments that while previously not many people died, now it seems like many do. This construction has been dubbed Negative Auxiliary Inversion (NAI), because the negated auxiliary verb (didn’t) appears before the subject (many). We focus on NAI sentences whose subject contains the word every, because these illustrate a unique meaning property of this construction. Consider the following: (1a) The food was terrible at that restaurant, so everybody didn’t eat. We all ate dinner when we got home. (1b) All the dishes had meat at that restaurant, so everybody didn’t eat. The vegetarians ate dinner when they got home. The underlined sentence in (1a/b) can mean either (a) that no one ate, or (b) that not everyone ate (though some may have). Foreman (1999) notes that in West Texas, this ambiguity disappears in NAI, and only the (b) reading exists: (2) Didn’t everybody eat. (The vegetarians ate at home.) Our experiment compared Appalachian and non-Appalachian speakers’ performance on a task in which they chose between (a) and (b) readings of NAI sentences with every. Appalachian speakers reliably chose the (b) reading, while non-Appalachian speakers did not. Though both groups displayed individual variation, the overall results suggest that knowledge of this meaning property of NAI is an inherent part of speaking Appalachian.
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URL: https://mds.marshall.edu/asa_conference/2019/session2/19
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| 2 |
Breaking into "Sounding Appalachian"
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In: ASA Annual Conference (2018)
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The Appalachian English Website: An Updated and Expanded Online Resource
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In: ASA Annual Conference (2017)
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| 4 |
The Archive of Traditional Appalachian Speech and Culture
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In: ASA Annual Conference (2016)
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| 5 |
Mountain Intonation: Using Pitch in Appalachian Englishes
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In: ASA Annual Conference (2015)
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| 6 |
Intersection of Appalachian Speech and Culture
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In: ASA Annual Conference (2014)
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| 7 |
Needed Research on the Englishes of Appalachia
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In: Linguistics Faculty Publications (2014)
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LAMSAS, CACWL, and the South-South Midland Dialect Boundary in Nineteenth-Century North Carolina
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ABOUT ALL: STUDIES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN ENGLISH I
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| 12 |
HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVES ON A-PREFIXING IN THE ENGLISH OF APPALACHIA
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| 17 |
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS: VOICES OF MY ANCESTORS: A PERSONAL SEARCH FOR THE LANGUAGE OF THE SCOTCH-IRISH
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