Touch down in Pittsburghese

Authors

R. Thomas McCoy, Johns Hopkins University, SAIS Bologna CenterFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

6-7-2019

Volume

1

Issue

3

Abstract

In standard American English, down may take a DP object only if the DP indicates a path, as in I walked down the street. However, for some speakers of Pittsburgh English, it is also grammatical for down to take a DP object indicating a location or goal, as in She works down Baltimore (meaning ‘She works down in Baltimore’). In this work, I describe the distributional properties of this usage, which I name “touch down.” Based on these properties, I propose the syntactic analysis that touch down licenses a silent preposition where standard American English has an overt preposition, and that this silent preposition incorporates into down.

Recommended Citation

McCoy, R. Thomas, "Touch down in Pittsburghese" (2019). Yale Working Papers in Grammatical Diversity. 3.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/ygdp/3