neglected literature on "so don't I"?

[Wilson Gray]

Interestingly - to me, in any case - this construction is also typical
of Cambridge (MA) BE. For instance, former boss of mine at Widener
Library, Baahbruh, used _so don't I_ and such, as well as pronouncing
"can't as "cawn't" and using other Cambridge localisms.

Her family was from Ballamer, where, it seems, Southern BE is spoken.
When she got a call from older relatives who had grown up down home
and not in Cambridge, they always asked for "Baahba Jean" in Southern
voice. As chance would have it, when I was about a year and a half old
- I've heard that children can't form memories before the age of
three, but that's clearly bullshit, since I can definitely remember
stuff from when I was around a year old, I had a playmate named
Barbara Jean, also called "Baahba Jean," of course, down in Port
Arthur, "Po Daahtha," TX.

 OTOH, since I haven't read the literature, it could be that the claim
is not that toddlers can't form any memories at all, but only that
they can't form coherent memories. I can agree with that. It's
certainly the case that my own oldest memories are entirely random.

Spoken by students from Cambridge-Rindge High School on a bus:

A. "This bus driva sucks!"

B. "So doesn't ya muhtha!"

-Wilson

On Wed, Jun 16, 2010 at 11:27 AM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      neglected literature on "so don't I"?
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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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>



--
-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"––a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
–Mark Twain

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