Needed Research in American Dialects: Variation in Morphosyntax
Jim Wood, Raffaella Zanuttini
March 2023 

In this chapter, we discuss avenues for future investigation into dialect variation in North American English morphosyntax, with a focus on four broad areas. First, the recent proliferation of data sources and methods for analyzing such data provides new opportunities for asking and addressing questions about dialect variation. Second, while we have learned much about the details of many morphosyntactic phenomena and syntactic constructions, the deeper we dig, the more intriguing– and sometimes puzzling– those details turn out to be. Third, theoretical syntacticians have begun to analyze the details of lesser known constructions, and there remains much work to be done in this area. Moreover, areas of grammatical variation are frequently discovered in theoretical work that could potentially yield new insights into American English dialects, and often these would benefit from the kinds of analysis being developed at the cutting edge of dialectological work. Finally, recent work on North American English morphosyntax has revealed some significant interactions between geographic region and other social determinants of variation, and the development of new methods of analysis may allow us to pursue questions in this area in novel and exciting ways.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/007205 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	In Robert Bayley & Erica Benson [eds.] Needed Research in North American Dialects (Duke University Press) [To appear]
keywords:	dialect variation; microsyntax; microvariation; gis; hot spots; verbal rather; come with; needs washed; done my homework; have yet to; dative presentatives; so don't i; positive anymore; hella; personal datives; crowdsourcing, morphology, syntax
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