Work on regional variation in mass/count nouns?

[Dennis Preston]

Carol G. Preston (the former Carol Guagliardo, of Milwaukee birth and
upbringing) has all such two-handled jointed tools as a + "plural" (a
pliers, a scissors, a clippers, with an interesting lack of intuition
about "nail clippers" as opposed to "grass clippers").

On another front, Milwaukeeans can (somewhat like "count chad" and
"drive truck") "buy bakery," and older respondents could "buy dairy."

dInIs

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>Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>Poster:       Joseph Salmons <jsalmons at WISC.EDU>
>Subject:      Work on regional variation in mass/count nouns?
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>
>A striking and even stereotyped feature of Upper Midwestern English
>is the use of what most of us have as count nouns as mass nouns and
>vice versa. Here in Madison 'a scissor' or 'a scissors' is utterly
>common, while 'going to wash my hairs' is a stereotype of Milwaukee,
>but actually used. (These two are often regarded as Germanisms, a
>possibility noted in DARE, for example.) There appear to be some
>other regional differences -- like 'let's go have a beer' vs. 'let's
>go have some beers' -- where the latter is the norm here (and in the
>East?), but only the former was familiar to me growing up in the South.
>
>In looking around for literature on this, I haven't found anything
>that treats such differences generally as a regional pattern. DARE
>has a few mentions for particular entries, but only a really brief
>note in the intro about it. In the ads-l archives, folks touch on
>this occasionally for particular words, but I don't see much broader
>discussion there either. Arnold Zwicky's handout on "Counting Chad"
>gives examples along the way to providing what looks like the best
>account of what's going on linguistically with this, but naturally
>doesn't focus systematically on regional differences.
>
>Surely there's more out there in the published lit, right? And surely
>folks have lots of examples of this, right?
>
>Thanks for any suggestions,
>Joe
>
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