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Between you and I: Case variation in coordinate noun phrases in Canadian English
Abstract
Variable case marking of pronouns in coordinate noun phrases (CoNPs) is a well-documented phenomenon which has elicited prescriptive censure for centuries. Drawing on the framework of variationist sociolinguistics, this study presents a detailed quantitative analysis of variable case marking in CoNPs in the
Quebec English Corpus
(Poplack, Walker and Malcolmson 2006), a massive compendium of vernacular speech. Operationalizing a number of extralinguistic and linguistic factors that are claimed to condition variable case marking in CoNPs, multivariate analysis revealed that speaker age and education as well as the syntactic position of the CoNP are key predictors in determining the case of pronouns in these constructions. An important finding is that case marking in CoNPs is highly variable for speakers, suggesting that the Sisyphean efforts of the prescriptive enterprise to impose uniformity on this area of the grammar have been to little avail as far as spontaneous usage is concerned. Comparison of the results with variable case marking in CoNPs in other varieties of English, as well as with diachronic patterns of variability, also raises the possibility that the accusative is increasingly assuming the role of default case in coordinate constructions.
... first person pronoun -any of those that are used by the speaker/producers of a manifest form of language to refer to themselves ("I" or "me", "we" or "us"; see Prazeres & Levey, 2014). Flavius Josephus -[born ca. ...
The human language capacity stands at the very top of the intellectual abilities of us human beings, and it ranks incommensurably higher than the intellectual powers of any other organism or any robot. It vastly exceeds the touted capacities of "artificial intelligence" with respect to creativity, freedom of will (control of thoughts and words), and moral responsibility. These are traits that robots cannot possess and that can only be understood by human beings. They are no part of the worlds of robots and artificial intelligences, but those entities, and all imaginable fictions, etc., are part of our real world...
True narrative representations (TNRs) can express and can faithfully interpret every kind of meaning or form in fictions, errors, lies, or nonsensical strings seeming in any way to be representations. None of the latter, however, can represent even the simplest TNR ever created by an intelligent person. It has been proved logically, in the strictest forms of mathematical logic, that all TNRs that seem to have been produced by mechanisms, robots, or artificial intelligence, must be contained within a larger and much more far-reaching TNR that cannot be explained mechanistically by any stretch of imagination. These unique constructions of real intelligence, that is, genuine TNRs, (1) have the power to determine actual facts; (2) are connected to each other in non-contradictory ways, and (3) are generalizable to all contexts of experience to the extent of the similarities of those contexts up to a limit of complete identity. What the logicomathematical theory of TNRs has proved to a fare-thee-well is that only TNRs have the three logical properties just iterated. No fictions, errors, lies, or any string of nonsense has any of those unique formal perfections.
The book is about how the human language capacity is developed over time by human beings beginning with TNRs known to us implicitly and actually even before we are born. All scientific endeavors, all the creations of the sciences, arts, and humanities, all the religions of the world, and all the discoveries of experience utterly depend on the prior existence of the human language capacity and our power to comprehend and produce TNRs. Without it we could not enjoy any of the fruits of human experience. Nor could we appreciate how things go wrong when less perfect representations are mistaken, whether accidentally or on purpose, for TNRs.
In biology, when DNA, RNA, and protein languages are corrupted, the proximate outcome is disorder, followed by disease if not corrected, and, in the catastrophic systems failures known as death in the long run. The book is about life and death. Both are dependent on TNRs in what comes out to be an absolute dependency from the logicomathematical perspective. Corrupt the TNRs on which life depends, and death will follow. Retain and respect TNRs and life can be preserved. However, ultimate truth does not reside in material entities or the facts represented by TNRs. It resides exclusively in the TNRs themselves and they do not originate from material entities. They are from God Almighty and do not depend at all on any material thing or body. TNRs outrank the material facts they incorporate and represent. It may seem strange, but the result is more certain, I believe, than the most recent findings of quantum physics. Representations are connected instantaneously. Symbol speed is infinitely faster than the speed of light.
In the larger perspective of history, when TNRs are deliberately corrupted, the chaos of wars, pestilence, and destruction follows as surely as night follows day. The human language capacity makes us responsible in a unique manner for our thoughts, words, and actions. While it is true that no one ever asked us if we wanted to have free will or not, the fact that we have it can be disputed only by individuals who engage in a form of self-deception that borders on pathological lying, the kind that results when the deceiver can no longer distinguish between the actions he or she actually performed in his or her past experience and the sequences of events that he or she invented to avoid taking responsibility for those events, or to take credit for actions he or she never performed. On the global scale such misrepresentations lead to the sort of destruction witnessed at Sodom in the day of Abraham. That historical destruction has recently been scientifically revealed at the site of Tall el-Hammam in Jordan. More about that and all of the foregoing in the book.
If you encounter errors, please point them out to the author at joller@bellsouth.net. Thank you.
In this paper we consider whether ethnicity is a significant determinant of variation in the spoken English of young working-class people in London. We base our analysis on a corpus of 1.4 million words of informal speech from 100 people aged 16-19, from one inner London and one outer London borough. Many (mainly white) Londoners moved from the inner city (the ‘East End’) to the outer London borough and further afield, particularly Essex, in the 1950s; by contrast, the inner London borough has a high proportion of recent migrants from overseas. We explore whether the nature of a speaker’s friendship group is a key factor in the diffusion of linguistic innovations, and whether this interacts with ethnicity. We hypothesise that speakers draw on a range of linguistic forms that cannot necessarily, or at least can no longer, be attributed to specific ethnic groups.
The sociolinguistic method is neither new to sociolinguistics nor universally adhered to by sociolinguists. It is a working hypothesis with a distinctive methodological and conceptual apparatus built up over the past 10 to 15 years in response to the particular needs of research guided by this hypothesis. The chapter discusses that the primary data for the study of linguistic structure, function, and change is the spoken language, more specifically spontaneous unreflecting speech in its natural context. Some of the consequences are traced of the natural speech hypothesis on not only the methodological level but also extending into linguistic theory. On the theoretical level, it focuses on two topics: one about the existence of the “syntactic variable” and the second on the “wave” theory.
Although the received wisdom is that English in Quebec, as a minority language, has undergone contact-induced language change, little scientific evidence has been brought to bear on this claim. We describe a project designed to assess the impact of a majority language on the structure of the minority language in a situation of long-term contact. The existence and directionality of change is assessed by comparing the behaviour of linguistic phenomena (1) over (apparent) time, (2) according to intensity of contact, and (3) against French as a non-contact benchmark and putative source. We detail the methods employed in selecting a sample and constituting a corpus, and characterize the speakers and aspects of their speech. Finally, we present an analysis of the sociolinguistic situation of the Quebec anglophone community, and offer an empirical measure of the impact of the French lexicon on Quebec English.
Long, complex phrases tend to come at the ends of clauses; this is called “endweight.” A variety of characterizations of weight have been proposed in the literature, but none has been sufficient to cover the full range of attested cases of end-weight. Corpus data on heavy NP shift, the dative alternation, and particle movement indicate that there are several structural measures of weight that are highly correlated with constituent ordering. Proposed explanations for endweight have been based on parsing considerations, largely ignoring the speaker; but what facilitates parsing does not always help in production. Examination of phenomena where these interests do not coincide indicates that the demands of sentence planning provide a better explanation for end-weight than parsing. Finally, accounts of end-weight cannot be purely structure-based, but must take lexical factors into consideration.
This paper is primarily concerned with inter- and intra-individually variable case-form mismatches inside coordinate determiner phrases (CoDPs). For English, the phenomenon is both socially salient (e.g., O'Conner & Kellerman 2009, among many others) and well studied (Angermeyer & Singler 2003, Quinn 2005, Grano 2006, Parrott 2007: Ch. 6). The most prominent theory of (default) case (Schütze 2001, incorporating Johannessen 1998) explains English variation in CoDPs mostly with parameterized syntactic mechanisms. The parametric theory does not make clear cross-linguistic predictions, and accordingly there has been little cross-linguistic investigation of case variation in CoDPs. This paper therefore has two main purposes. The first is to argue for a theory of (default) case (Parrott 2007, 2009a, following Emonds 1986, and incorporating McFadden 2004, 2007) within the Distributed Morphology (DM) framework (Halle & Marantz 1993, Embick & Noyer 2007). In contrast with the parametric theory, the DM theory makes testable cross-linguistic predictions that, inter alia, connect the (non) attestation of case mismatches in CoDPs with Germanic case typology. Thus, the paper’s second purpose is to present some results from investigations, utilizing diverse empirical methods, into case variation in CoDPs for Danish and Faroese. These results are consistent with predictions made by the DM theory.
The study of how language varies in social context, and how it can be analyzed and accounted for, are the key goals of sociolinguistics. Until now, however, the actual tools and methods have been largely passed on through 'word of mouth', rather than being formally documented. This is the first comprehensive 'how to' guide to the formal analysis of sociolinguistic variation. It shows step-by-step how the analysis is carried out, leading the reader through every stage of a research project from start to finish. Topics covered include fieldwork, data organization and management, analysis and interpretation, presenting research results, and writing up a paper. Practical and informal, the book contains all the information needed to conduct a fully-fledged sociolinguistic investigation, and includes exercises, checklists, references and insider tips. It is set to become an essential resource for students, researchers and fieldworkers embarking on research projects in sociolinguistics.
This volume constitutes the first comprehensive overview of the variety of Canadian English spoken in Newfoundland and Labrador, long recognized as linguistically distinct within North America. It provides an accessible introduction to the phonetic, grammatical, lexical and discourse features of contemporary Newfoundland English, along with the speech of the province’s continental portion, Labrador. Newfoundland English is shown to be a generally conservative variety, which has preserved a number of features that have undergone attrition elsewhere. Likewise, the region’s close ties with Britain and Ireland (Newfoundland constituted an independent British dominion until its union with Canada in 1949) are shown to be reflected in the many linguistic features it shares with its two chief European founder varieties, southwest British English (West Country English) and southern Irish English. The volume also describes the extensive regional and social variation that characterizes Newfoundland English, and relates this to historical, geographical, demographic and social factors. It outlines how the considerable socioeconomic and cultural change experienced by the region since the mid 20th century is reflected in ongoing linguistic change. Language change is also contextualized relative to insider and outsider attitudes to local speech varieties. In addition, the volume provides illustrative speech samples, in the form of nine texts representing both contemporary and traditional regional varieties of Newfoundland and Labrador. These texts are accompanied by online audio files. It also includes a survey of published work on Newfoundland English from the late 16th century to the present.
Two general principles of sexual differentiation emerge from previous sociolinguistic studies: that men use a higher frequency of nonstandard forms than women in stable situations, and that women are generally the innovators in linguistic change. It is not clear whether these two tendencies can be unified, or how differences between the sexes can account for the observed patterns of linguistic change. The extensive interaction between sex and other social factors raises the issue as to whether the curvilinear social class pattern associated with linguistic change is the product of a rejection of female-dominated changes by lower-class males. Multivariate analysis of data from the Philadelphia Project on Linguistic Change and Variation indicates that sexual differentiation is independent of social class at the beginning of a change, but that interaction develops gradually as social awareness of the change increases. It is proposed that sexual differentiation of language is generated by two distinct processes: (1) for all social classes, the asymmetric context of language learning leads to an initial acceleration of female-dominated changes and retardation of male-dominated changes; (2) women lead men in the rejection of linguistic changes as they are recognized by the speech community, a differentiation that is maximal for the second highest status group.
A fresh perspective on the prescription-versus-description debate, including a new approach to such pronominal (ab)use as ‘between you and I’
The use of the nominative 1SG pronouns in co-ordinate
NPs in object position, most famously between
you
and
I,
has received much attention from prescriptivists and formal
linguists, but it has never been the object of a variationist study
that compares its usage to that of other variants. This article seeks
to fill the gap, based on a data set of co-ordinate NPs in object
position, gathered through observation of everyday speech as well as in
experimental sociolinguistic interviews. Arguing that the choice of NP
case and of NP order is inseparably related, we identify three major
patterns of co-ordinate NPs: Vernacular me
and
X and two
post-Vernacular patterns, Standard X
and
me and Polite X
and
I. We then examine social and linguistic factors that
constrain the usage of individual patterns. We conclude that all three
patterns are robust and that they exist in stable ternary
variation. a
This paper presents arguments that Universal Grammar includes a notion of “default case” different from that which has generally been assumed in the literature. It comprises the case forms used to spell out nominals that do not receive a case specification by assignment or other syntactic means. As such, it does not interact with the Case Filter, which is argued to be a purely syntactic constraint as opposed to a morphophonological one. It is shown that diverse phenomena in the distribution of pronouns in English can be parsimoniously treated using default case, and further that English can thereby be assimilated to “richer” case languages such as German, rather than being analyzed with arbitrary language-particular rules. A sampling of phenomena from other languages demonstrates that evidence for default case is widespread, and moreover, that crosslinguistic differences in case patterns can often be reduced to the choice of a default case.
Current difficulties in achieving intersubjective agreement in linguistics require attention to principles of methodology which consider sources of error and ways to eliminate them. The methodological assumptions and practices of various branches of linguistics are considered from the standpoint of the types of data gathered: texts, elicitations, intuitions and observations. Observations of the vernacular provide the most systematic basis for linguistic theory, but have been the most difficult kinds of data for linguists to obtain; techniques for solving the problems encountered are outlined. Intersubjective agreement is best reached by convergence of several kinds of data with complementary sources of error.
“Comparative sociolinguistics”
- Tagliamonte
“Grammatically deviant prestige constructions”
- Emonds