Syntactic differences between dialects of English

FranE

Do support with auxiliaries in ellipsis

• "Do you think we should try to get Mikel involved?"

  Fran's response: "We can do"

  JNW's response: "We can [ / do that / try / *do]"

• "And actually, we need to make this a lot smaller"

  Fran's response: "Yeah we can do"

  JNW's response: "Yeah, we can [ / do that / try / *do]"

Lexical differences

• "put the piss on X" = ???
• "peabrain" has no bullying connotations, just ласкательные
• "hob" = stove/cooktop
• "cooker" = range/~stove/~oven
• "beermat" = coaster
• "coaster" = apparently only ones that aren't cardboard/paper

Unacceptable forms

• "traffic circle"
• "cooktop"

ABrE

ABraver's English shall henceforth be called "ABrE"

Argument order

• "replace"
  • To show that item A has taken the place of item B, both of the following are acceptable in ABrE:
    • I replaced item A with item B
    • I replaced item B with item A
  • But:
    • Item A was replaced by item B
    • # Item B was replaced by item A

• This phenomenon was discussed by Aaron in his blog

Pronuncimamations

'Regular'

• abraver: [ɻejgjɯlɻ]
• jonw: [ɻɛgjɯlɻ]

[and for the record, jonw is stupid]

TaMclE

Tristan's dialect of AusE.

Argument of "stop"

•  %"but will usually stop other places if hailed"

Aspectual differences

• *"Did you eat yet?" ("Have you eaten yet?")
• —whereas JNW: √"Did you eat yet?" ("Have you eaten yet?")

"That one"

• "I didn't want that one either, oh well" (as person puts ketchup on a wrap)
• —whereas JNW: "I didn't want that stuff either, oh well"
• apparent grammaticalised use of "that one" as a demonstrative, whereas JNWEnglish differentiates between "that one" and "that stuff", and if grammaticalised, are grammaticalised separately for mass and count nouns

"Meant to" vs "Supposed to"

JNW has some distinction here that TAMcL doesn't have.

"Wonder about"

• *"I wonder about why the sky is blue". The word "about" doesn't work there...

"until"/"through"

• (15:13:04) kesuari: so "/bat@/ butter is how i pronounce what you say as /bVtr/" would have the entire phrase up until "as" in italics
• In TaMclE, this could mean that "as" either is in italics or not (i.e. ambiguous)
• In TaMclE, to disambiguate and let "as" be in italics, "up until the end of 'as'" would be used
• In JNWE, the word "as" would not be in italics.
• In JNWE, the word "as" would be in italics if the preposition "through" were used instead of "until"

Other people

Things that other people say that freak me out that they're grammatical

• "Here's the beauty part"
  • Should be "Here's the beautiful part"
• "…does that supposed to…"
  • Should be "…is that supposed to…"
• "The more, the miserable"
  • Should be "The more, the miserabler", right?
• "Believe it or not, but ..."
  • Should be "believe it or not, ..."
• "Since coming to I.U., how many student organizations have you been a member?"

Vocabulary

isogloss	explanation	JNWE	ABrE	TaMclE	MTE
scarf (down) v.t.	eat (consume) very crudely	✓		*	✓
scoff down v.t.	eat (consume) very crudely	*		✓
scarf/scoff away at v.	crudely eat away at	✓		*
scarf/scoff n.	food; grub	*		*
scarf/scoff v.i.	eat (intransitive!)	*		*
cark it	die	*		✓	*
wonder about + wh-relativiser		✓		*
did...yet		✓		*
rinky-dink	might fall apart easily	✓		*
on the lake	by/near the lake, not "on" it	✓		*
ride in a car		✓		*