needs washed

[Laurence Horn]

At 1:50 AM -0500 1/26/03, Scott Sadowsky wrote:
>On 2003-01-25 21:13, Dan Goodman wrote the following:
>
>>1) According to a native of Pittsburgh, the proper pronunciation is
>>"needs warshed".
>>
>
>That epenthetic /r/ is hardly ubiquitous in Pittsburgh -- it seems
>to be limited to certain segments of the working class.  It has,
>however, been taken to be prototypical of Pittsburgh speech, and
>I've seen it mentioned as being the "authentic" Pittsburgh
>pronunciation in booklets of the "How to speak Pittsburghese" ilk.
>
>The "needs"+past participle construction seems to be universal thereabouts.
>
Along the same lines:  "need/want" + p.ppl. is typically taken to be
a shibboleth for Pittsburghese (although technically, as we've seen,
it extends to S. and C. Ohio and other adjacent and even non-adjacent
areas), while the "warshington" R is thought of as much more widely
dispersed.  This is, to be sure, what dInIs would call perceptual
dialectology rather than the real thing.

Larry