1887
Volume 35, Issue 2
  • ISSN 0172-8865
  • E-ISSN: 1569-9730
USD
Buy:$35.00 + Taxes

Abstract

Variable case marking of pronouns in coordinate noun phrases (CoNPs) is a well-documented phenomenon which has elicited prescriptive censure for centuries. Drawing on the framework of variationist sociolinguistics, this study presents a detailed quantitative analysis of variable case marking in CoNPs in the Quebec English Corpus (Poplack, Walker and Malcolmson 2006), a massive compendium of vernacular speech. Operationalizing a number of extralinguistic and linguistic factors that are claimed to condition variable case marking in CoNPs, multivariate analysis revealed that speaker age and education as well as the syntactic position of the CoNP are key predictors in determining the case of pronouns in these constructions. An important finding is that case marking in CoNPs is highly variable for speakers, suggesting that the Sisyphean efforts of the prescriptive enterprise to impose uniformity on this area of the grammar have been to little avail as far as spontaneous usage is concerned. Comparison of the results with variable case marking in CoNPs in other varieties of English, as well as with diachronic patterns of variability, also raises the possibility that the accusative is increasingly assuming the role of default case in coordinate constructions.

Loading

Article metrics loading...

/content/journals/10.1075/eww.35.2.03pra
2014-01-01
2025-02-09
Loading full text...

Full text loading...

/content/journals/10.1075/eww.35.2.03pra
Loading
  • Article Type: Research Article
Keyword(s): case marking; coordinate noun phrases; Quebec English; sociolinguistic variation
This is a required field
Please enter a valid email address
Approval was successful
Invalid data
An Error Occurred
Approval was partially successful, following selected items could not be processed due to error