Zero-option

[Timothy Wright]

RON BUTTERS WROTE: Here is a native speaker of American English, an educated, middle-aged man with no noticeable regional American accent and no particular grammatical idiosyncracies except he starts about 20% of his sentences with "is".

I know a linguist (no doubt a native speaker of American English plus the rest of the above, except he's past  middle age) who starts a big percentage of his sentences with "Aye" (eye). Also, I think we all know lots of native speakers of Canadian English who end their sentences with "Eh".

I tend to dismiss both phenomena as mannerisms, but I am not a linguist.

TIM WRIGHT












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