Document Type

Book

Publication Date

6-2020

Volume

2

Issue

4

Abstract

This work presents the results of a series of acceptability judgment surveys conducted by the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project (YGDP) between 2015 and 2019. It contains over 200 maps of some 194 sentences, covering a wide range of syntactic constructions, including dative presentatives, personal datives, extended benefactives, the have yet to construction, the done my homework construction, wicked, hella, the so don’t I construction, the alls construction, the come with construction, fixin’ to, the needs washed construction, non-polarity anymore (aka “positive anymore”), and many others. For each sentence, we also provide some basic demographic information, such as how the sentence judgments varied by age, race, gender, education, and urban/rural classifications. We describe the goals of these surveys, as well as how they were designed, administered, processed, and mapped, along with a brief introduction to the history of the YGDP. In addition to providing a detailed look at syntactic variation in U.S. English to an extent that has previously been unavailable, we hope that this work will be useful in linguistics classrooms at all levels, and will provide the springboard for further, more detailed studies of the individual constructions, geographic regions, and linguistic and social factors connected to syntactic variation in U.S. English.

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Syntax Commons

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