Singular Y'ALL: some data

[Beverly Flanigan]

Very nice example, and confirmed by my Southern student (Alabama and
Tennessee).  But I have an extension kind of question:  For plural
possessive, would you/you all say "your all's" or "you all's"?  Granted, if
one is r-less, the production would sound like "y'all's" (as below).  But
if you're r-ful (as many Southerners and most South Midlanders are), would
you say "your all's," i.e., is there an underlying /r/ which may or may not
be pronounced?  An Athens County student of mine insists that she said
"your all's" both as a child in Mississippi and as an adolescent and adult
in southern Ohio.

At 11:26 AM 5/23/01 -0400, you wrote:
>There was some discussion here in the past (and in AMERICAN SPEECH) about
>whether Y'ALL is coming to be used in the singular in the American South. I
>have always maintained that the reported evidence for putative singular Y'ALL
>is either an artifact of the research situation (e. g., Guy Bailey's Oklahoma
>telephone survey) or a mistaken understanding of the pragmatics of the
>reported utterance--for example, when a salesperson bids goodbye to a
>solitary customer by saying, "Y'all come back, hear?" (an idiom meaning 'you
>and your friends and family come back, please!'). Note that salespersons are
>not reported as greeting their solitary customers with *"Can I help y'all?"
>
>Last night I was a part of a conversation that I thought at first was going
>to change my view of this issue -- but it ended up merely confirming it.
>Fred, a 21-year-old working-class white native of Hillsborough, North
>Carolina, was telling a story about how he had successfully rejected an offer
>to take drugs. What follows is a paraphrase of his actual utterance, which
>was not mechanically recorded. I have, however, been faithful to the
>significant details.
>
>FRED: So all the time I was cutting the grass I kept thinking about how great
>it would be to get high. And wouldn't you know it, just as I was finishing
>the job one of my old running buddies pulled up in his car and immediately
>started talking about how HE had a new supply of great drugs and how I should
>come off with HIM and get high. I told HIM I wasn't interested, that I was
>not going to do any drugs, not today. Well, HE got right ugly, so I said,
>"Y'ALL get in Y'ALL'S car and get out of here." And THEY left.
>
>If one is looking for evidence for putative singular Y'ALL, it is hard to
>find better data than this. Granted, one must explain away the third-person
>plural THEY in the final sentence as an instance of the impersonal singular
>THEY (cf. EVERYONE LIKES PIZZA, DON'T THEY?). However, the evidence of the
>immediately antecedent singular masculine HE/HIM appears to argue
>overwhelming that Y'ALL is here being used as a singular.
>
>But in fact, that is not what Fred meant at all. I asked him, "How many
>people were there trying to get you to go off and use?"
>
>"Two," said Fred, "my buddy and his girlfriend. And she got even uglier than
>he did."
>
>Fred's usage not only was not an instance of singular Y'ALL, his usage
>suggests strongly that, in his mind, Y'ALL cannot ever be singular. He
>assumed that his audience would understand from his selection of Y'ALL
>(rather than YOU) that there were two or more people in the car that he was
>ordering to be removed from his backyard.


_____________________________________________
Beverly Olson Flanigan         Department of Linguistics
Ohio University                     Athens, OH  45701
Ph.: (740) 593-4568              Fax: (740) 593-2967
http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm