LingLunch | Dr Gary Thoms (Glasgow)

10 March 2017

Time: 1:00 - 3:00pm
Venue: Scape 1.02

Variation, change and the amn't gap

It is well known that Standard British and American dialects of English lack a form for the affixation of the reduced negation -n't onto the 1SPRES form of be. This is known as the amn't gap, and quite why such a gap would appear in these dialects has been the subject of much debate (Zwicky and Pullum 1983, Hudson 2000, Bresnan 2001, Frampton 2001, Anderwald 2004, Broadbent 2009, Yang 2017). In this talk I report on preliminary findings from the Scots Syntax Atlas which show that amn't is on the rise in modern Scots dialects: it is rated as acceptable much more widely by younger speakers (18-25) as compared to older speakers (65+), in both inversion and declarative contexts, and it is accepted much more commonly by both groups of speakers in tags than in declaratives, although for many speakers both are possible. I develop an account in terms of an adapted version of the theory in Yang (2017) and argue that aspects of the variation we see is related to the expanded inventories of negated auxiliaries in Scots dialects.