Datives, data and dialect syntax in American English

What it is about

The paper studies dative constructions that vary across speakers of American English: Personal Datives ("I love me some baked beans"), Southern Dative Presentatives and Extended Benefactives. The data are online acceptability surveys run on Amazon Mechanical Turk. Each survey has about 45 sentences, 30 of them fillers and half of those controls. Ratings go from 1 to 5. Participants who fail the controls, or who lived in their childhood home for fewer than 8 years, are removed. The ratings are plotted on maps, with statistically significant hot spots and an interpolation of the judgments. The maps show that Personal Datives are concentrated in the South but accepted well beyond it. The authors argue that the low applicative phrase is DP-like in these dialects, and that this explains why it appears as a subject of a small clause or as the complement of a preposition.

Ideas

• I1. 13. Verbs: write the Personal Dative as a construction in the grammar. A dative pronoun co-referent with the subject and without reflexive morphology ("I had me a cabin") is a pattern the parser can mark. Test on the paper's examples and keep reflexives ("I saw myself") as a negative set.
• I2. Use the paper's control design for Mova's own test sets: a set of ungrammatical control sentences must score lower in the rule grammar than the filler sentences. Report the controls as a separate line in every eval.
• I3. Add a region tag to constructions in 08. National varieties, with the rule that licenses each one, so that the grammar can say why a dialect form is accepted.

For Mova

The chapters are 08. National varieties, 23. Complementation and 13. Verbs. The code is en/src/parse.rs (the parse of the construction) and the tests in en parse-eval. Measure: the number of paper examples that get the right frame, with the control sentences counted as failures when they are accepted.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5334/gjgl.527

@article{wood2018datives,
  title = {{Datives, data and dialect syntax in American English}},
  author = {Wood, Jim and Zanuttini, Raffaella},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2018},
  doi = {10.5334/gjgl.527},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.527}
}

References

60 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

1. Anagnostopoulou, Elena. 2006. Clitic doubling. In Martin Everaert & Henk van Riemsdijk (eds.), The Blackwell companion to syntax I (chap. 14). 519–581. Malden, MA: Blackwell. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470996591.ch14 ↗
2. Arregi, Karlos & Andrew Nevins. 2012. Morphotactics: Basque auxiliaries and the structure of spellout. Dordrecht: Springer. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-3889-8 ↗
3. Barbiers, Sjef, Hans Bennis, Gunther De Vogelaer, Magda Devos & Margreet van der Ham. 2005. Syntactic atlas of the Dutch dialects I. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5117/9789053567005 ↗
4. Barbiers, Sjef, Johan van der Auwera, Hans Bennis, Eefje Boef, Gunther De Vogelaer & Margreet van der Ham. 2008. Syntactic atlas of the Dutch dialects II. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. find
5. Barbiers, Sjef, Mario van Koppen, Hans Bennis & Norbert Corver. 2016. MIcrocompara-tive MOrphosyntactic REsearch (MIMORE): Mapping partial grammars of Flemish, Brabantish and Dutch. Lingua 178. 5–31. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2015.10.018 ↗
6. Béjar, Susana. 2008. Conditions on phi-Agree. In Daniel Harbour, David Adger & Susana Béjar (eds.), Phi theory: Phi-features across modules and interfaces, 130–154. Oxford: Oxford University Press. find
7. Béjar, Susana & Milan Rezac. 2009. Cyclic Agree. Linguistic Inquiry 40(1). 35–73. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1162/ling.2009.40.1.35 ↗
8. Benincà, Paola. 1994. La variazione sintattica. Bologna: Il Mulino. find
9. Bosse, Solveig. 2014. A formal semantic approach to personal datives in Southern and Appalachian English. Southern Journal of Linguistics 38(1). 95–116. find
10. Campanini, Cinzia & Florian Schäfer. 2011. Optional se-constructions in Romance: Syntactic encoding of conceptual information. Paper presented at Generative Linguistics in the Old World (GLOW) 34. find
11. Christian, Donna. 1991. The Personal Dative in Appalachian English. In Peter Trudgill & J. K. Chambers (eds.), Dialects of English, 11–19. London: Longman. find
12. Conroy, Anastasia M. 2007. The Personal Dative in Appalachian English as a Reflexive Pronoun. In Akira Omaki, Iván Ortega-Santos, Jon Sprouse & Matthew Wagers (eds.), University of Maryland Working Papers in Linguistics, 63–88. College Park, MD: University of Maryland. find
13. Cuervo, María Cristina. 2003. Datives at large. Cambridge, MA: MIT Doctoral Dissertation. find
14. Cuervo, María Cristina. 2010. Against ditransitivity. Probus 22. 151–180. DOI: https:// doi.org/10.1515/prbs.2010.006 Déchaine, Rose-Marie & Martina Wiltschko. 2002. Decomposing pronouns. Linguistic Inquiry 33(3). 409–442. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1162/002438902760168554 ↗
15. Den Dikken, Marcel. 2006. Relators and linkers: The syntax of predication, predicate inversion, and copulas. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. find
16. Dudley, Fred A. 1946. ‘Swarp’ and some other Kentucky words. American Speech 21(4). 270–273. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/487323 ↗
17. Elgin, Suzette Haden & Rebecca Haden. 1991. A celebration of Ozark English: A collection of articles from the lonesome node–1980 to 1990. Huntsville, AR: OCLS Press. find
18. Erlewine, Michael Yoshitaka & Hadas Kotek. 2016. A streamlined approach to online linguistic surveys. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 34(2). 481–495. DOI: https:// doi.org/10.1007/s11049-015-9305-9 Etxepare, Ricardo & Bernard Oyharçabal. 2013. Datives and adpositions in Northeastern Basque. In Beatriz Fernández & Ricardo Etxepare (eds.), Syntactic microvariation in datives, 50–95. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. ↗
19. Fábregas, Antonio & Ángel J. Gallego. 2014. Morphological variation in Spanish. Lingua 151(Part B). 97–119. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2014.09.007 ↗
20. Fernández, Beatriz & Jon Ortiz de Urbina (eds.). 2016. Microparameters in the grammar of Basque. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/ lfab.13 Gerwin, Johanna. 2014. Ditransitives in British English dialects. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110352320 ↗
21. Gibson, Edward, Steve Piantadosi & Kristina Fedorenko. 2011. Using Mechanical Turk to obtain and analyze English acceptability judgments. Language and Linguistics Compass 5(8). 509–524. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-818X.2011.00295.x ↗
22. Haddad, Youssef A. 2011. The syntax of Southern American English Personal Datives: An anti-locality account. The Canadian Journal of Linguistics/La revue canadienne de linguistique 56(3). 403–412. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/cjl.2011.0032 ↗
23. Harley, Heidi. 1995. Subjects, events and licensing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Doctoral Dissertation. find
24. Harley, Heidi. 2012. Lexical decomposition in modern generative grammar. In Wolfram Hinzen, Markus Werning & Edouard Machery (eds.), Handbook of compositionality, 328–350. Oxford: Oxford University Press. find
25. Harley, Heidi & Hyun Kyoung Jung. 2015. In support of the P HAVE analysis of the double object construction. Linguistic Inquiry 46(4). 703–730. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1162/ LING_a_00198 Henry, Alison. 1992. Infinitives in a for-to dialect. Linguistic Inquiry 10(2). 279–301. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00133814 ↗
26. Horn, Laurence R. 2008. “I love me some him”: The landscape of non-argument datives. In Olivier Bonami & Patricia Cabredo Hofherr (eds.), Empirical issues in syntax and semantics 7, 169–192. find
27. Horn, Laurence R. 2013. “I love me some datives”: Expressive meaning, free datives, and F-implicature. In Daniel Gutzmann & Hans-Martin Gärtner (eds.), Beyond expressives: Explorations in use-conditional meaning, 153–199. Leiden: Brill. find
28. Horn, Laurence R. 2014. Afterword: Microvariation in syntax and beyond. In Raffaella Zanuttini & Laurence R. Horn (eds.), Micro-syntactic variation in North American English, 324–347. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof: oso/9780199367221.003.0011 Hutchinson, Corinne & Grant Armstrong. 2014. The syntax and semantics of Personal Datives in Appalachian English. In Raffaella Zanuttini & Laurence R. Horn (eds.), Micro-syntactic variation in North American English, 178–214. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199367221.003.0006 ↗
29. Johnson, Kyle. 1991. Object positions. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 9. 577–636. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00134751 ↗
30. Kayne, Richard S. 1993. Toward a modular theory of auxiliary selection. Studia Linguistica 47. 381–405. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9582.1993.tb00837.x ↗
31. Keenan, Edward L. 2002. Explaining the creation of reflexive pronouns in English. In Donka Minkova & Robert Stockwell (eds.), Studies in the history of the English language: A millennial perspective, 325–354. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI: https:// doi.org/10.1515/9783110197143.3.325 Kortmann, Bernd & Kerstin Lunkenheimer. 2011. Feature 9: Benefactive ‘Personal Dative’ construction. In Bernd Kortmann & Kerstin Lunkenheimer (eds.), The electronic world atlas of varieties of English (eWAVE). Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. http://ewave-atlas.org/. ↗
32. Kratzer, Angelika. 1996. Severing the external argument from its verb. In Johan Rooryck & Laurie Zaring (eds.), Phrase structure and the lexicon, 109–137. Dordrecht: Kluwer. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8617-7_5 ↗
33. Lee, Ju-Eun. 2016. English Personal Dative constructions and applicative theory. English Language and Linguistics 22(1). 39–66. DOI: https://doi.org/10.17960/ell.2016.22.1.003 ↗
34. Legate, Julie Anne. 2002. Warlpiri: Theoretical implications. Cambridge, MA: MIT Doctoral Dissertation. find
35. Liberman, Mark. 2009. On beyond Personal Datives? Language Log (blog), Nov. 5. http:// languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1863. ↗
36. Montgomery, Michael & Joseph S. Hall. 2004. Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press. find
37. Myler, Neil. 2014. Building and interpreting possession sentences. New York, NY: New York University Doctoral Dissertation. find
38. Myler, Neil. 2016. Building and interpreting possession sentences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. find
39. Pesetsky, David. 1995. Zero syntax: Experiencers and cascades. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. find
40. Poletto, Cecilia. 2000. The higher functional field. Evidence from North Italian dialects. Oxford: Oxford University Press. find
41. Pylkkänen, Liina. 2002. Introducing arguments. Cambridge, MA: MIT Doctoral Dissertation. find
42. Pylkkänen, Liina. 2008. Introducing arguments. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. DOI: https:// doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262162548.001.0001 Reinhart, Tanya & Eric Reuland. 1993. Reflexivity. Linguistic Inquiry 24(4). 657–720. ↗
43. Reuland, Eric. 2001. Primitives of binding. Linguistic Inquiry 32(3). 439–492. DOI: https:// doi.org/10.1162/002438901750372522 Reuland, Eric. 2011. Anaphora and language design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ↗
44. Schäfer, Florian. 2008. The syntax of (anti-)causatives. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/la.126 ↗
45. Sprouse, Jon. 2011. A validation of Amazon Mechanical Turk for the collection of acceptability judgments in linguistic theory. Behavior Research Methods 43(1). 155–167. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-010-0039-7 ↗
46. Sroda, Mary Sue & Margaret Mishoe. 1995. “I jus like to look at me some goats”: Dialectal pronominals in Southern English. Paper presented at New Ways of Analyzing Variation 24. find
47. Teomiro García, Ismael Iván. 2013. Non-selected reflexive datives in Southern American and Appalachian English vs. Spanish. Estudios Ingleses de la Universidad Complutense 21. 31–47. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5209/rev_EIUC.2013.v21.43272 Tyler, Matthew & Jim Wood. To appear. Microvariation in the have yet to construction. Linguistic Variation. ↗
48. Uriagereka, Juan. 1995. Aspects of the syntax of clitic placement in Western Romance. Linguistic Inquiry 26. 79–123. van Craenenbroeck, Jeroen. 2010. The syntax of ellipsis: Evidence from Dutch dialects. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. van Gelderen, Elly. 2000. A history of English reflexive pronouns. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/la.39 van Koppen, Marjo. 2005. One probe – two goals: Aspects of agreement in Dutch dialects. Leiden: University of Leiden dissertation. ↗
49. Webelhuth, Gert & Clare Dannenberg. 2006. Southern American English Personal Datives: The theoretical significance of dialectal variation. American Speech 81. 31–55. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-2006-002 ↗
50. Wolfram, Walt & Donna Christian. 1976. Sociolinguistic variables in Appalachian dialects. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. find
51. Wood, Jim. 2015. Icelandic morphosyntax and argument structure. Dordrecht: Springer. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09138-9 Wood, Jim. To appear. Quantifying acceptability judgments in regional American English dialect syntax. Linguistics. ↗
52. Wood, Jim & Alec Marantz. 2017. The interpretation of external arguments. In Roberta D’Alessandro, Irene Franco & Ángel J. Gallego (eds.), The verbal domain, 255–278. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198767886.003.0011 ↗
53. Wood, Jim, Laurence R. Horn, Raffaella Zanuttini & Luke Lindemann. 2015. The Southern Dative Presentative meets Mechanical Turk. American Speech 90(3). 291–320. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-3324487 ↗
54. Wood, Jim, Raffaella Zanuttini, Laurence R. Horn & Jason Zentz. 2018. Dative country: Markedness and variation in Southern dative constructions. Manuscript, Yale University. find
55. Zanuttini, Raffaella. 2017. Presentatives and the left-periphery. In Enoch Aboh, Eric Haeberli, Genoveva Puskás & Manuela Schönenberger (eds.), Elements of comparative syntax: Theory and description. Berlin and Boston: Mouton de Gruyter. find
56. Zanuttini, Raffaella, Jim Wood, Jason Zentz & Laurence Horn. 2018. The Yale Grammatical Diversity Project: Morphosyntactic variation in North American English. Linguistics Vanguard 4(1). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2016-0070 ↗
57. How to cite this article: Wood, Jim and Raffaella Zanuttini. 2018. Datives, data and dialect syntax in American English. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 3(1): 87. 1–22, DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.527 ↗ our card
58. Submitted: 18 September 2017 find
59. Published: 08 August 2018 find
60. Copyright: © 2018 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by Ubiquity Press. OPEN ACCESS ↗

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/wood-2018-datives-data-dialect-syntax-american/