Several misconceptions about language are pervasive in our culture. For example, it is common for people to think that American English is uniform, except for some differences in pronunciation ("accents"). This is not true: in addition to lexical and phonological differences, American English also exhibits morphological and syntactic diversity across its varieties. It is also common to think that, for any language, there is a variety that instantiates it at its best, while other varieties represent departures from the norm and are somehow inferior (less pure, rich, sophisticated, etc.). This is also not true: research in linguistics unambiguously shows that every language comes in many varieties, both diachronically and synchronically, and that such varieties have similarly rich and sophisticated grammatical systems. Creating broader awareness of these findings of linguistics can help to correct these misconceptions, and lead to a broader understanding and acceptance of diversity, linguistic and otherwise.
Many facets of syntactic diversity in American English are still not fully understood. This project aims to clarify some of them to better understand a variety of complex properties across different grammatical systems. The research has two main goals. One is to build an atlas of varieties of American English based on syntactic differences, providing graphic representations of areas where people use different syntactic constructions. The other goal is to shed light on an issue that is important to our understanding of human language, namely syntactic differences between pronouns (e.g. "they") and noun phrases (e.g. "the students"). The researchers will administer surveys designed to elicit acceptability judgments on sentences using Amazon Mechanical Turk. They will analyze the results of these surveys, plot the distribution of various constructions on maps, and conduct interviews with a subset of survey participants. The results will contribute to our understanding of pronouns as well as our broad knowledge of how speakers of the relevant constructions are distributed, geographically and socially, across the United States. The surveys will also include numerous other test sentences, which will serve as pilot studies to plant the initial seeds for a syntactic dialect atlas of the United States. This latter sub-project, we expect, will promote greater communication and cross-fertilization between dialectologists and theoretical syntacticians.
