Abstract
Was/were Variation in the Middle Rocky Mountains
Highlights
Was/were variation is one of the most widely studied vernacular features in English (Adger and Smith 2005: 155), little attention has been paid to its presence in western varieties of American English, despite the insight such an investigation might provide to both the linguistic phenomenon and to regional varieties that have been generally overlooked in the sociolinguistic literature
LAWS interviews have been conducted in California, Texas, Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, but in terms of fieldwork, transcription and analysis, it is the latter three states that have received the greatest attention toward a subset of the LAWS corpus called the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies (LAMR)
Several findings emerged from this study, both at the local level in what it says about middle Rocky Mountain English and data collected via LAWS methods and, at a more global level, in the contribution it makes to ongoing discussion of was/were variation in English
Summary
Was/were variation is one of the most widely studied vernacular features in English (Adger and Smith 2005: 155), little attention has been paid to its presence in western varieties of American English, despite the insight such an investigation might provide to both the linguistic phenomenon and to regional varieties that have been generally overlooked in the sociolinguistic literature. I analyze was/were variation in the middle Rocky Mountain by applying corpus tools to a set of 70 interviews collected in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming toward the compilation of a Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies (LAMR) and compare findings from this analysis with those of studies on was/were variation in other varieties of English. With respect to personal pronouns in Standard English, was is used as the pasttense copula in conjunction with singular subjects (I, he/she/it), while were is used with plural pronoun subjects (we, they) and pronoun subjects that are unmarked for number (you). Labov et al (1968) and Feagin (1979) use the term “invariant was” in their work in Harlem and Anniston, respectively, while in their investigation of Appalachian English, Wolfram and Christian (1976) use the label “subject/verb nonconcord.” Chambers (1995: 242) uses the term “default singulars” and elsewhere has called them “primitives of vernacular dialects” and “vernacular universals” (Chambers 2001). The current study follows others (e.g. Cheshire and Fox 2009; Anderwald 2001; Tagliamonte 1998) that refer to the phenomenon as was/were variation
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