Adaptation at the Syntax-Semantics Interface: Evidence From a Vernacular Structure.

Expanding on psycholinguistic research on linguistic adaptation, the phenomenon whereby speakers change how they comprehend or produce structures as a result of cumulative exposure to less frequent or unfamiliar linguistic structures, this study asked whether speakers can learn semantic and syntactic properties of the American English vernacular negative auxiliary inversion (NAI) structure (e.g., , meaning "not everybody ate") during the course of an experiment.

Comprehension of Vernacular Features in Aphasia.

Purpose: Insights from linguistic variation research illustrate a linguistically diverse population, in which even speakers who can be classified as speaking a "mainstream" variety have grammatical knowledge of vernacular or "nonmainstream" features. However, there is a gap in our knowledge regarding how vernacular features are comprehended in people with aphasia (PWA). This article presents the results of a pilot study exploring how PWA respond to linguistic stimuli that include the vernacular feature, negative concord (NC), often referred to by the more colloquial term (e.

Asymmetries in the Acceptability and Felicity of English Negative Dependencies: Where Negative Concord and Negative Polarity (Do Not) Overlap.

Negative Concord (NC) constructions such as (meaning "the news anchor warned nobody"), in which two syntactic negations contribute a single semantic one, are stigmatized in English, while their Negative Polarity Item (NPI) variants, such as , are prescriptively correct. Because acceptability is often equated with grammaticality, this pattern has led linguists to treat NC as ungrammatical in "Standard" or standardized English (SE). However, it is possible that SE grammars do generate NC sentences, and their low incidence and acceptability is instead due to social factors.