Mapbook of Syntactic Variation in American English: Survey Results, 2015–2019
Jim Wood, Kaija Gahm, Ian Neidel, Sasha Lioutikova, Luke Lindemann, Josephine Holubkov, Lydia Lee
June 2020
 

This work presents the results of a series of acceptability judgment surveys conducted by the Yale GrammaticalDiversity 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.

Note: We have now made our full dataset available in CSV and R format, in a .zip file which you can download by clicking "file" below (next to "pdf"). Upon downloading, change the file name from woodEtAl_20_Mapbook-of-Sy.file to woodEtAl_20_Mapbook-of-Sy.zip. Information about the column headers can be found in ygdp_data_dictionary.csv.

Format: [ pdf ][ file ]
Reference: lingbuzz/005277
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: Yale Working Papers in Grammatical Diversity
keywords: dialect syntax, microsyntactic variation, gis analysis, datives, personal datives, dative presentatives, benefactives, extended benefactives, morphology, syntax
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