Yale Grammatical Diversity Project featured in Yale Alumni Magazine cover story

Positive anymore, drama so, needs washed, multiple modals, and negative concord are among the phenomena highlighted in a Yale Alumni Magazine cover story on the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project, led by professor Raffaella Zanuttini and post-doctoral associate Jim Wood. Their team includes several undergraduate and graduate students as well as professor Larry Horn. The project’s goal is to build a repository of research on the morphosyntactic diversity found within English varieties spoken in North America. The team pays particular attention to attested examples, plotting each one on an interactive map.

The YAM article provides its own series of example-based maps to illustrate the phenomena under investigation but also directs readers to the project’s website for further exploration. Prof. Zanuttini is given the opportunity to discuss the inevitability of language variation and the sociopolitical underpinnings of how terms like language and dialect are commonly used. The article challenges readers to examine their linguistic prejudices and gives them an excellent window into an ongoing research project within our department.