TY - JOUR
T1 - Syntactic variation and auxiliary contraction
T2 - The surprising case of scots
AU - Thoms, Gary
AU - Adger, David
AU - Heycock, Caroline
AU - Smith, Jennifer
N1 - Funding Information:
Press. MACKENZIE, LAUREL. 2012. Locating variation above the phonology. Philadelphia: Uni-versity of Pennsylvania dissertation. M EXAS, HARIS. 2016. Mirativity as realization m arking: A cross-linguistic study. Leiden: Universiteit Leiden m aster’s thesis. NESPOR, M ARINA, and IRENE VOGEL. 1986. Prosodic phonology. Dordrecht: Foris. NUNES, JAIRO. 2004. Linearization of chains and sideward movement. Cam bridge, MA: MIT Press. POSTAL, PAUL M., and G EOFFREY K. PULLUM. 1978. Traces and the description of English com plem entizer contraction. Linguistic Inquiry 9.1–29. Online: https://www.jstor.org /stable/4178032. POSTAL, PAUL M., and G EOFFREY K. PULLUM. 1982. The contraction debate. Linguistic In-quiry 13.122–38. Online: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4178264. PULLUM, GEOFFREY K. 1997. The m orpholexical nature of English to-contraction. Lan-guage 73.79–102. DOI: 10.2307/416594. PULLUM, GEOFFREY K., and ARNOLD M. ZWICKY. 1997. Licensing of prosodic features by syntactic rules: The key to auxiliary reduction. Paper presented at the annual m eeting of the Linguistic Society of Am erica, Chicago. Online: https://web.stanford.edu/~zwicky /PZ1997.pdf. R ADFORD, A NDREW, and C LAUDIA F ELSER. 2011. On preposition copying and preposition pruning in wh-clauses in English. essex Research Reports in Linguistics 60(4). Online: http://repository.essex.ac.uk/id/eprint/86. R ETT, JESSICA. 2011. Exclam atives, degrees and speech acts. Linguistics and Philosophy 34.411–42. DOI: 10.1007/s10988-011-9103-8. RIZZI,LUIGI.1986.Onchainform ation.Thesyntaxofpronominalclitics(Syntax&sem an-tics 19), ed. by Hagit Borer, 65–95. New York: Academ ic Press. R OBERTS, IAN. 2010. Agreement and head movement: Clitics, incorporation and defective goals. Cam bridge, MA: MIT Press. ROOTH, MATS. 1985. Association with focus. Am herst: University of Massachusetts, Am herst dissertation. SCHüTZE, CARSON T., and JON SPROUSE. 2013. Judgm ent data. Research methods in lin-guistics, ed. by Robert Podesva and Devyani Sharm a, 27–50. Cam bridge: Cam bridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139013734.004. S ELKIRK, E LISABETH O. 1984. Phonology and syntax: The relation between sound and structure. Cam bridge, MA: MIT Press. SELKIRK, ELISABETH O. 1996. The prosodic structure of function words. Signal to syntax: Bootstrapping from speech to grammar in early acquisition, ed. by Jam es Morgan and Katherine Dem uth, 187–213. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum . SIGURðSSON, HALLDóR ÁRMANN. 2011. Conditions on argum ent drop. Linguistic Inquiry 42.267–304. DOI: 10.1162/LING_a_00042. S MITH, JENNIFER. 2015–2019. The Scots Syntax Atlas. Research project funded by the Arts and Hum anities Research Council, AH/M005550/1. Glasgow: University of Glasgow. SMITH,JENNIFER,andMERCEDESDURHAM.2012.Bidialectalism ordialectdeath?Explain-ing generational change in the Shetland Islands, Scotland. American Speech 87.57–88. DOI: 10.1215/00031283-1599959. SVENONIUS, PETER. 2010. Spatial P in English. Mapping spatial PPs: The cartography of syntactic structures, vol. 6, ed. by Guglielm o Cinque and Luigi Rizzi, 127–60. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195393675.003.0004. THOMS,GARY,andCRAIGSAILOR.2018.Whensilencegetsintheway:Extractionfrom do-ellipsis in British dialects. North east Linguistic Society (NeLS) 48.145–54. TORTORA, C HRISTINA M. 1997. The syntax and semantics of the weak locative. Newark: University of Delaware dissertation. TORTORA, C HRISTINA M. 2001. Evidence for a null locative in Italian. Current studies in Italian syntax: essays offered to Lorenzo Renni, ed. by Guglielm o Cinque and Giam - paolo Salvi, 313–26. London: Elsevier. TORTORA, C HRISTINA M. 2014. A comparative grammar of Borgomanerese. New York: Ox-ford University Press.
Funding Information:
We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council for award no. AH/M005550/1. Material from this article was presented to audiences at the University of Edinburgh, UCL, the LAGB Annual Meeting (York 2016), and the Cambridge Comparative Syntax Workshop (CAMCOS 2017). For helpful feedback we thank members of those audiences, as well as E Jamieson, Craig Sailor, the editors of Language, and our two anonymous referees. Special thanks to associate editor Christina Tortora for particularly detailed feedback on later drafts of the article, and to E Jamieson for a great deal of helpful input.1 Here and throughout we rely on standard orthographic means of representing contractions, giving fuller phonetic transcriptions only where they are relevant.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019, Linguistic Society of America. All rights reserved.
PY - 2019/9
Y1 - 2019/9
N2 - This article is concerned with the distribution of contracted auxiliaries in English, in particular the restriction against their occurrence in the immediate context of a gap created by movement or ellipsis. We document apparent exceptions to this restriction in varieties of Scots, all occurring in what we call the locative discovery expression. We analyze these as mirative constructions, and using new data from the Scots Syntax Atlas, we describe patterns of variation in the accep-tance of auxiliary contractions in locative discovery expressions that provide clues as to the role of syntax in conditioning auxiliary contraction. Adapting the proposal in Wilder 1997, where contracted auxiliaries are prosodically incorporated into the following predicate, we provide an account in which the differences across dialects with respect to contraction are explained in terms of the availability of different abstract structures.
AB - This article is concerned with the distribution of contracted auxiliaries in English, in particular the restriction against their occurrence in the immediate context of a gap created by movement or ellipsis. We document apparent exceptions to this restriction in varieties of Scots, all occurring in what we call the locative discovery expression. We analyze these as mirative constructions, and using new data from the Scots Syntax Atlas, we describe patterns of variation in the accep-tance of auxiliary contractions in locative discovery expressions that provide clues as to the role of syntax in conditioning auxiliary contraction. Adapting the proposal in Wilder 1997, where contracted auxiliaries are prosodically incorporated into the following predicate, we provide an account in which the differences across dialects with respect to contraction are explained in terms of the availability of different abstract structures.
KW - Microcomparative syntax
KW - Scots
KW - auxiliary contraction
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85074517593&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85074517593&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1353/lan.2019.0052
DO - 10.1353/lan.2019.0052
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85074517593
VL - 95
SP - 421
EP - 455
JO - Language
JF - Language
SN - 0097-8507
IS - 3
ER -