Language attitudes toward a grammatical construction: Connective

Abstract

This study investigates American English speakers' language attitudes toward connective which constructions, specifically those with an apparent resumptive pronoun (see Loock 2007). In American English, sentence-level variation is typically negatively evaluated (Wolfram 2004), and as a form that utilizes apparent resumptive pronouns, which are ungrammatical in American English, connective which should be no exception. We performed a modified matched-guise task to evaluate the language attitudes of 36 native American English speakers toward naturally-occurring instances of this non-standard construction. We found that not only do listeners not have negative attitudes toward this construction, but they do not seem to notice connective which at all. These findings support the idea that which is being re-analyzed from a relative pronoun to a conjunction (Sells 1985, Kuha 1994, Loock 2007). This study helps us better understand language attitudes toward sentence-level variation in American English.