Toward an atlas of micro-syntactic variation in varieties of English

Nick Huang, Zachary Maher, Sabina Matyiku, Raffaella Zanuttini, Yale University

Abstract

What should a student look up to find out which syntactic properties of his or her variety are distinctive, why they are worth investigating, and who has written about them? Where should a linguist go to find out about micro-syntactic variation among varieties of English spoken in North America? Or to search whether property A correlates with property B only in one variety, or in all varieties that exhibit it? The database we are designing is meant to be an answer to these questions, among others. We will be presenting our initial work on the Micro-Syntactic Atlas of Varieties of English (MSAVE), discussing its goals and its format, and welcoming feedback on some of the issues that need to be resolved.