neglected literature on "so don't I"?

[Laurence Horn]

For a proposed organized LSA session on the syntactic properties and
implications of certain regional constructions in U.S. English on
which I'm collaborating with Raffaella Zanuttini and others, I'm
trying to track down any treatments of the "so don't I" (or "so
AUXn't NP") construction with pleonastic negation, attested for some
northeast U.S. speakers, especially in eastern New England, and
occasionally in other areas.

A:  I can do that.
B:  So can't I.     (= 'so can I')

This construction has been touched on here in various threads over
the years and pops up in numerous popular booklets and published
papers about New England dialect idiosyncrasies or pleonastic
negation but--unlike, say, positive "anymore", which has been the
topic of numerous brief notices and longer pieces in _American
Speech_ over the last 80 years and scholarly studies by Labov,
Murray, and other dialectologists and variationists--none of the
references I've found to "so don't I" really go into any depth about
its history, evolution, or distribution.  It's not that we lack
data--in particular, I do have some very helpful cites that Joan
Houston Hall kindly provided--but what I want to make sure we don't
overlook is any systematic discussion of the construction in the
literature. Am I missing something?

LH

P.S.  We're not looking at literal instances of the string "So
don't/do not I" following a positive clause and interpretable as
'(but) I do not do so', which go back to Shakespeare.  On the other
hand, we are including instances of "So don't I" following a negative
clause, as in (2) as opposed to (1):

(1)  They would do a good job, but so wouldn't we.   '...but so would we'
(2)  They wouldn't do a good job, and so wouldn't we.   '...and
neither would we'

(These examples are from Jim Wood of NYU, a participant in the
proposed workshop. Wood's empirical research indicates that the
speakers who accept (1) are disjoint from those who accept (2); of
course most English speakers don't get either.)

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