neglected literature on "so don't I"?

[Mark Mandel]

While I don't have any literature to point to, I have wondered whether
this construction originated as a rhetorical question, e.g.,

"Harry's having money problems, but these days so aren't we all?"

This is just a question, pure speculation with no evidence. Do you
know of any pro or con?

m a m

On Wed, Jun 16, 2010 at 11:27 AM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
>
> 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: Â I can do that.
> B: Â So can't I. Â  Â  (= '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. Â 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. Â 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. Â 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) Â They would do a good job, but so wouldn't we. Â  '...but so would we'
> (2) Â They wouldn't do a good job, and so wouldn't we. Â  '...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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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org