Mapping the ‘Alternative One’ Construction in American English

Authors

Guilherme M. C. Pereira, Yale University

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

12-24-2024

Volume

6

Issue

4

Abstract

Alternative one is an understudied construction accepted by speakers of some American English dialects in sentences like (i), where the word one appears immediately after a disjunction.

(i) I need to talk to John or Malcolm, one.
'I need to talk to John or Malcolm, one or the other.'

(Montgomery 2006:152)

In this paper, I present maps of acceptability judgments of this construction in the U.S., using data from a survey administered by the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project in 2020 and 2021. The maps confirm the geographical distribution claimed for alternative one in the Dictionary of American Regional English (Cassidy and Hall 1991)—that it is primarily a "South and South Midland" construction—and they raise questions about other properties of this construction.

Recommended Citation

Pereira, Guilherme M. C. 2024. Mapping the ‘Alternative One’ Construction in American English. Yale Working Papers in Grammatical Diversity 6 (4), 1–11.