required plural marking in 2PP

[Michael Newman]

You guys is pretty general in NYCE among Asians and Whites. I've noticed it used by African Americans and Latinos who avoid AAE too. There's no exclusion of females involved, nor is there with "guys" as vocative. Youse is heard too in NYC. You all can be heard but more rarely.

Thanks Matt for that reference and Wilson for confirming the obligatoriness that I suspected.



Michael Newman
Associate Professor of Linguistics
Queens College/CUNY
michael.newman at qc.cuny.edu



On Jul 8, 2012, at 9:52 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: required plural marking in 2PP
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Sun, Jul 8, 2012 at 3:19 PM, Benjamin Barrett <gogaku at ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>> I think I that or "you guys," but "guys" still has the hint of excluding women, so "you all" or "everyone" works better.
>
> But there was that awful commercial in which a woman surprised by her
> friend girls exclaims, "Oh, you guys!" One of that thong that made it,
> IMO, awful was that it's hard to come up with something that she could
> have said instead, other than "Oh, you all are so nice! to me!" or
> some such.
>
> --
> -Wilson
> -----
> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
> to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> -Mark Twain
>
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