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:
* We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Arts and Hum anities 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 Cam bridge Com parative Syntax Workshop (CAMCOS 2017). For helpful feedback we thank m em bers of those audiences, as well as E Jam ieson, Craig Sailor, the editors of Language, and our two anonym ous referees. Special thanks to associate editor Christina Tortora for particularly detailed feedback on later drafts of the article, and to E Jam ieson for a great deal of helpful input.
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
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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 -