See Hazen (1997) for a fuller discussion of this phonetic variant. The spelling wont is used to refer to a special phonetic variant of past tense be discussed below. In citing examples, the ethnicity of the speaker (L for Lumbee, AA for African American, and W for Anglo American), sex, and age of the subject are given in parentheses following the example. Though we are not now without error, we are certainly much better off for their investment of time and insight. Supportive colleagues who have responded to our emerging analysis include Natalie Schilling-Estes, Kirk Hazen, Clare Dannenberg, Sali Tagliamonte, and Jack Chambers. Thanks also to Tarra Atkinson and Stacie Jackson for helping us conduct interviews in Fairmont, North Carolina. In light of these findings, I will address some theoretical issues concerning was/were variation, particularly the popular notion that it adheres to an implicational scale and how well this scale applies to was/were variation in the LAMR collection. In this study, therefore, 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. Introduction Although 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. Despite the fact that both he and she belong to the same syntactic category of third person singular pronouns, they do not constitute a uniform context for were- generalization.ฤก. From a methodological point of view, we will make a case for neatly distinguishing between "he + past BE" and "she + past BE" as separately stored construction schemata. But even the occasional (from a usage-based view) unexpected frequency distributions seem to lend themselves to a constructionist account, though not necessarily of the usage-based type. The regular distributions patterns observed can be easily accounted for within a usage-based framework. Our corpus study attempts to apply insights of usage-based constructionist models to the study of pronoun - past BE combinations in several British dialects, investigating frequency distributions for was- and were-generalization for different pronouns. We will argue that a usage-based constructionist approach offers a compelling explanation why certain theoretically possible agreement systems noted in previous resarch are not attested. This paper deals with variation in agreement systems in English dialects.
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