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 - 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
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U2 - 10.1353/lan.2019.0052
DO - 10.1353/lan.2019.0052
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85074517593
SN - 0097-8507
VL - 95
SP - 421
EP - 455
JO - Language
JF - Language
IS - 3
ER -