Y'all and No?

[Laurence Horn]

At 12:16 PM -0600 3/29/01, Mark Odegard wrote:
>To my sensibility, the uncontracted 'you all', as in "I thank you all for
>coming" is common in all forms of AmE (and not just "Suthron". Only when it
>is contracted does it become noticeable.
>
It's not just the uncontractedness but the syntactic and
extralinguistic context.  "You all want any dessert?" addressed to
two diners is pretty much [+ southern] to my ears.  In your example,
a paraphrase with "all of you" is possible, with a real quantifier,
but here it's not, it's just a 2d person plural.

larry