Some parallels, accidental and expected

The articles in this issue were developed from presentations in the Intersections workshop held concurrently with NWAV44. The goals of that workshop were to widen and deepen the study of linguistic variation by creating intersections with other approaches to linguistic analysis.

Before I accepted the invitation to introduce our speakers, I asked myself the question, "why me?" Why am I particularly qualified to talk about the limitations of our field? After some thought, I realized it must be because I share those limitations as much as anyone here. I have never worked with the formal apparatus needed to study syntactic change. A majority of my work has been in phonology and sound change. I have never studied multilingual communities. I have done only one study of the acquisition of language. None of the languages or dialects I have studied have been in danger of extinction. And until recently, I had not created any corpora.

Given such a qualifying limitation, what could I say to make a useful connection with our distinguished contributors? Reading through the drafts of the plenary talks that I received prior to the workshop, I did locate in each case some good point of contact, finding, to put it informally, that we were on at least one of the same pages. To illustrate this goal, I will highlight several of these intersections here.

In the background –and often foregrounded–will be the challenge of the covariation of form and meaning. Since the early years of variation studies, the majority have dealt with grammatical factors–plural marking, past tense specification, verbal agreement, auxiliary realization, possession, do-support, question inversion, negative concord, adverb placement. Nevertheless, at each step we return to the issue raised by Beatriz Lavandera (1978). Her observation that the alternation of tense and aspect in Spanish si-clauses cannot be considered alternate ways of "saying the same thing" has been generalized to question all studies of variation above the phonological level. Sankoff and Thibault's (1981) definition of "weak complementarity" has not resolved the issue. As re-formulated by Adger (2014), the fundamental problem is how to determine the equivalence between two syntactic forms and a single semantic interpretation, a problem that does not arise at the phonological or morphophonological levels. On the other hand, Poplack and Dion (2009) observe that the search for an equivalence of form and function has led linguists as well as prescriptive grammarians to formulate semantic differences that are not supported in actual use.

Rather than tackle these general issues head on, I will look to those parallels that bring our work into contact.

I turn first to the article by David Adger, who broke new ground in the treatment of variability in syntactic theory (Adger 2014). Here he re-analyzes the findings of Nancy Dorian on the possessive in East Sutherland Gaelic, and deals, more specifically, with the alternation of inflectional and periphrastic possessives in this dialect.

(1) bràthair Sheumais   am bràthair aig Seumas
Seumas's brother    the brother of Seumas

It just so happens that my own research on ways to raise reading levels in elementary schools had recently encountered the same variable. Wolford (2006) studied this variable in our recordings of 24 children in the 2^nd, 3^rd and 4^th grades in Philadelphia, Atlanta and Southern California. She observed two types of variation from the expected forms of classroom English:

(2) and the friend of my brother brought it back. (∼ my brother's friend)

(3) ...like when I go to my cousin house. (∼my cousin's house)

Type (2) possessives, though not ungrammatical in English, suggest influence of the Spanish possessive construction, which is always periphrastic. Type (3) is parallel to the most common pattern of AAVE in which the possessor in bare form is directly followed by the possessed. The suggestion that this shows the effect of dialect contact is confirmed by Wolford's multivariate analysis. Type (2) is most favored by Latina girls in California who learned to read in Spanish first. Type (3) is most favored by African-American boys in Philadelphia. Furthermore, children from Mexican families showed a much stronger...